This
essay will probably be the last essay on this site to be finished, and I do not
know when that will be - probably not for years, if ever. The first draft was
written in 1999, and was about the most emotionally draining part of all my writing
work.

This site needs some war material,
so snippets of my earlier work are herein presented. This site’s American Empire essay is the closest thing to this essay.
This introduction will summarize this essay’s intent, and will point interested
readers in directions where they can find out more.

In
short, warfare is organized murder, although heavy layers of ideology, deception
and other tricks have tried raising violence and murder to noble levels. Humanity’s
violent ways are directly related to how humanity expanded its range across the
planet, leaving its fruit-eating home in the tropical forests millions of years
ago. The weaponry used to become super-predators came in handy to prey
upon fellow humans. Humanity’s carnivorous ways are directly related to its murderous
ways.

Soldiers are nearly always young
men whose testosterone overrides their brains and hearts, and societies manipulate
their vulnerable condition to turn them into murderers, but murderers for the
right team. Probably no war in world history was really fought for the publicly
stated reasons, unless somebody was honest enough to state that it was simply
murder for gain. Although “defensive” violence might seem “justified,” it is
always the least enlightened response to any “threat,” and virtually every murderer
plays mind games to transform the crime into no crime at all, but something self-righteously
justified.

People seem to need justifications
for violence, so all military-oriented societies have huge cultural engines that
labor to create seemingly noble rationales. One rule seems to be that the more
ornate the pageantry that accompanies militaristic displays (Nuremberg rallies,
military parades, air shows, flag-waving holidays and attractive uniforms covered
with medals), the less “justified” the violence it ultimately inflicts. Violence
is always a violation of somebody’s free will, and until people can develop spiritual perspectives, humanity will probably always conjure
rationales to justify violence. Long ago, George
Orwell wrote in his Politics and the English Language, “In our time,
political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”[1]
If anything, the situation has become worse since then.

A
major goal of this essay was to challenge the innumerable myths that Americans
subscribe to regarding the wars it fights. So, it took aim at America’s “best”
war, World War II. This essay was designed to:

There
was precious little justification for dropping atom bombs
on Japan, as even admitted by nearly all American military leaders of the
day. It was largely a successful tactic to limit Soviet influence in Eastern
Asia, with a bit of racist vengeance thrown in.

World
War II was a battle of empires, with Germany and Japan coming
to the imperial table, as Germany also had before World War I, but the other Great
Powers already “owned” the world; the Pacific Theater was
nothing more than an intensely racist battle for empire.

The
United States is history’s most racist nation, and much of the evil that Hitler
wrought was simply copying what the United States did when it built its “great nation.” Hitler is a scapegoat.
He was not so much an aberration of the Western mind, but its epitome. The United
States hired many of the most of useful Nazis in Operation Paperclip
(even if they performed human experiments in the death camps), quickly rehabilitated
the most ardent Nazi supporters in Germany to run Germany, and quickly rebuilt
the political-economic framework that led to the Third Reich’s rise.

The United States war planners
had no illusions; World War II was a battle for
global dominance, and the United States largely joined the fray so it could come
out on top, which it did. The subsequent Cold War was only because there was
a hitch to Western Europe and its political descendants owning the entire planet;
World War II was a huge financial windfall for numerous industrialists, and those
same interests largely hold the world captive today, while hiding behind the American flag.

The
Nazis were beaten by the Soviet Union, not the United States. The Eastern Front
was where history’s greatest battles were fought. The Normandy invasion was more
of a sideshow and a U.S. attempt to limit Soviet influence in Europe.

This essay will deal with some of those issues,
but not nearly in the breadth and depth that they deserve, because I do not have
enough time, energy and money to do so. Quite a few works have echoed my themes.
On the complicity of the United States in the Jewish holocaust, try David Wyman’s
The Abandonment of the Jews. On dropping the atom bomb and the American
aftermath, see Gar Alperovitz’ The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and
Robert Jay Lifton’s Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. On the
intensely racist and take-no-prisoners approach in the Pacific Theater, see Eugene
Sledge’s With the Old Breed and John Dower’s War Without Mercy.
On the many myths, fabrications and Disney-fication of World War II, see Paul
Fussell’s Wartime, Michael Adams’ The Best War Ever, and Howard
Zinn’s The Politics of History and Declarations of Independence.
For a recent book that resembles the theme of my war essay regarding World War
II, see Michael Zezima’s Saving Private Power, which is an admittedly sarcastically
titled attempt to counterbalance the flag-draped cheerleading that Steven Spielberg’s
Saving Private Ryan and related works have recently
been doing. On the burgeoning holocaust industry and how Jewish scholars have
muddied the issue, see Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide and
Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (which even the redoubtable
holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg supports). On the continuity of the Native
American and Jewish holocausts, see David Stannard’s American Holocaust.
For the U.S. hiring death camp Nazis and quickly “rehabilitating”
the most ardent Nazi-supporters in Germany, putting them right back into the positions
of power that they had before World War II, see Christopher Simpson’s Blowback
and The Splendid Blond Beast.

The Business of War

Smedley Butler, one of America’s greatest war heroes, wrote
a slim book titled War is a Racket. Many
years ago, I heard a man describe the mentality of 18-year-old men when faced
with battle. He said that if a commander spoke to a gathering of one thousand
18-year-old soldiers, telling them that tomorrow they would be in a battle, and
only three would survive, those soldiers would all look at each other, thinking
to themselves, "Gee, I'm going to miss these guys."

One of the war racket's pillars is exploiting the immortal feeling
that 18-year-old men feel. Those immortal feelings are engendered by the fact
those men are nearly children, have not quite seen the world's brutal realities,
and they are brimming with the power of their 18-year-old bodies. One's physical
fitness does not get any better than between eighteen to twenty years old. When
that man described how the 18-year-old soldiers would take their commander's news,
he also said that if that commander addressed one thousand 40-year-old men with
the same speech, nobody would show up for battle the next day. By age forty,
men are acquainted with their mortality and have no desire to throw their lives
away while attempting to take the life of somebody they never met.

My life is a case in point. America
has always been a warrior nation. I do not know about my family tree during the
1800s, but during the 20th century one of my grandfathers fought in World War I and was crippled by his participation.
My other grandfather was in World War II in the South
Pacific. My father was a Marine in the Korean War, and eventually was a boot
camp drill sergeant. My uncles and brothers were all in the military. Going
up my family tree, I am the first man in my family I know of that did not serve
in the American military, and I nearly did.

My
father spent his entire career working for the federal government, usually for
the Department of Defense. My father helped instill the notion in me that I would
not quite be a man unless I served in the military. He would talk about how one
could tell if somebody had been in the military. According to my father, men
with military backgrounds were somehow manlier, had few pretensions and had been
through the humbling experience of being a soldier. At age 17, I had little idea
of my own mortality, and did not really question that I would go through my rite
of passage, becoming a soldier. As I look back, I have a difficult time believing
that mature men would encourage that perspective, but they did. I was even told
by a relative a few weeks ago (summer of 2002) that I should have served in the
military,

During
my senior year in high school, I applied and was quickly nominated by my Congressman
for a slot at the Air Force Academy. The next step was athletics testing.[2]
Thinking about who I might be killing, or being killed myself, was the furthest
thing from my mind. Part of my motivation was free college. War’s realities
are never emphasized in the indoctrination process, and immortal youth rarely
thinks about it. I was an indoctrinated cog in the machine.

Thankfully,
somebody was looking out for me, and in that instance it was my mother. She realized
that her gentle child would not enjoy the military experience, and probably shuddered
to think of what it would do to me. People do not come back from war "normal."
The experienced traumatized all of my soldier-ancestors.

My
mother prevailed on my father to talk me out of further pursuit of an Air Force
Academy position. One day my father sat me down and took me to task for my motivation
in applying to the Air Force Academy. My answers were not convincing, even to
myself, and I notified my Congressman that I would no longer pursue a position
at the Air Force Academy.

My spiritual
studies began in earnest that same year, and by age 19 I was a committed pacifist,
but I nearly became an Air Force pilot. It is quite possible that I would have
been dropping bombs on Iraq in 1991 if I had
gone that route. The clever war planners know what they are doing, and part of
their brainwashing strategy is evident in actions such as renaming the War Department
the "Defense" Department right after World War II. They lifted a page
out of Orwell's 1984.

The "Good War"

Paul
Fussell is a great iconoclast of the American military and warfare in general.
Fussell was a World War II soldier, and was wounded in France. He recounts his
experience in Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic. His Wartime
is considered by many to be the best book ever written about World War II.

This essay cannot do justice to Wartime.
Wartime does not question the need to fight wars, but explores the psychology
of warfare, both on the front and at home. Fussell finishes Wartime with
his most biting chapter, titled "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books."
In Wartime, Fussell described the evolving psychological condition of soldiers.
There are three stages. The first is that immortal perspective that all young
soldiers have when joining the military. None of the soldiers think that they
will die. It could not happen to them. As they go through training, talk to
experienced soldiers and see some of war's realities, it sobers them up a little,
but their attitude is still that they are too smart, too fast, too good looking
or too lucky to get killed. They don their psychic armor, believing themselves
impervious to bullets.

Native Americans
often had such delusions. They would go through involved rituals to magically
protect themselves in battle, making them impervious to bullets or invisible.
European and American soldiers were charmed by the native fantasies as they unceremoniously
mowed them down.

When a young soldier
finally gets on the battlefield, seeing what really happens when men are committed
to killing each other, it is a shock. If they survive battle for long (a few
minutes is usually enough), they quickly attain the next stage of their psychological
awareness. They think, "Hey, it is dangerous out here! I should be more
careful." They think that if they are careful and clever, they will survive.
If they survive long enough, they arrive at their final psychological state.
They know that they are alive by sheer luck. Those bullets whizzing by and exploding
bombs have somebody's name written on them, and it is only a matter of time until
their turn comes.

During World War
II, and particularly in the Vietnam War, with soldiers engaged in heated battle
for months on end, with the industrialized horror that wars of previous centuries
did not see, war psychologists saw a new phenomenon. It was discovered that no
human being's psyche could survive long in that situation. No matter how brave
or heroic, if a human being survives modern battle situations for a long (with
intense battle, the time they can hold their sanity together is measured in days),
they will begin mentally falling apart. Even America's most heroic soldier, Audie Murphy, whose exploits on the battlefield may never be
equaled, suffered from "shell shock" for the rest of his life. "Real
men" did not admit to such frailty, but that did not make the condition disappear.
War planners devised a concept called a "tour of duty," whereby if a
soldier survived a year in the theater of combat, they were relieved of duty.
The human wreckage of Vietnam War veterans is a testament to the hazards of extended
periods of battlefield conditions. Instead of "shell shock," the medical
term is now Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

In
Wartime's final chapter, Fussell discussed war's reality. He made the
case that the true horror of war is never depicted in the popular media. In today's
high-tech wars, where pilots drop bombs and never see the enemy, America's soldiers
do not usually see war's reality. Fussell wrote extensively on the "Disneyfication"
of war that the popular media presents. He was writing about World War II. The
situation is arguably worse today, even in the world of electronic media, supposedly
bringing the world to America's living room in an instant. With careful management
by the Pentagon and complicity by the media, Americans were not treated to the
reality of the devastation of Panama and Iraq
a decade ago.

In World War II, it was
not quite as Orwellian, but Fussell wrote about how soldiers felt as they came
back from the battlefield, with cheery Red Cross girls handing them candy and
comic books. The soldiers realized that the folks back home knew nothing about
war's reality, and frankly, they did not want to recall it, and nobody at home
really wanted to hear it. It made many soldiers cynical and bitter, but they
resigned themselves to the fact that the battlefield reality will never be shown
to the folks at home.

In a society that
brainwashes young men into thinking that glory will be had by killing people in
a flag's name, the grim realities are never revealed.
The same mentality carefully hides slaughterhouses, factory
farms, environmental devastation, and the immense human suffering that our
system produces in Latin America, Africa, Asia and America's inner cities. The
cultural machine quietly covers up the ugly realities, presenting shrink-wrapped
meat in butcher shops, leaving a strip of trees to conceal a clear cut, American
reporters refusing to report the "secret war" that America waged against
Cambodia and Laos for years, covering up the mass
murder at Jonestown, and so on.

Saving
Private Ryan, released in 1998, came the closest that any American movie ever
had to depicting the carnage of modern warfare. I thought that maybe young American
men would understand if they saw it. I was in for a surprise. A friend took
his fifteen-year-old son to see Saving Private Ryan. I asked him what
his son's reaction was. His son is a computer gaming wizard, playing war games
with friends on computers.

While my
friend watched the landing at Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan, his son
reacted to the movie as if it was another computer game. As he watched the carnage,
he told his father that those soldiers were doing it wrong, that their attack
strategy was flawed, and that he could design a better attack. The lad was playing
general, and had no conception that he would have been getting his head
blown off, not some general in a strategy room, looking at a map and moving toy
soldiers and boats around with a stick.

My
friend also had a younger brother in the Marines. His brother's commanding officer
gave the whole platoon the afternoon off to go watch Saving Private Ryan.
I wondered why a commanding officer would do something like that, showing those
soldiers a glimpse of war's reality. My friend's response surprised me again.
The commanding officer sent those soldiers to watch Saving Private Ryan
to get them "pumped up.” I should have known better. When my friends were
in the military, they usually talked about "seeing action" as if it
would be the crowning moment of their lives. The Marines came storming out of
watching Saving Private Ryan, nearly beating their chests, eagerly looking
forward to the day that they would see "action."

Howard
Zinn was a World War II soldier himself, and made many ironic observations
about his military years. Zinn was highly critical of Saving Private Ryan
(the review is available on the Internet). Sure, the carnage of war was depicted
as never before, but as Zinn observed, the thrust of the movie was that those
men were making a noble sacrifice, and that although war may be bloody, it is
ultimately a noble undertaking. I thought about the movie again, and realized
that Zinn was right. Almost all war movies are antiwar movies, but Spielberg's
masterpiece depicted the affair as noble, although he showed many of its warts.
Saving Private Ryan is a pro-war movie, and it barely lost the Academy
Award for best picture. Thank you Howard, for helping me see. That theme of
Saving Private Ryan is one reason those movie-going Marines came out pumped
up.

World War II
is always depicted as the last "good war," where the line between good
and evil was easily seen, with those depraved Nazis and their death camps. Fussell,
as he recounted his experiences in Doing Battle, and as he dissected the
entire war experience in Wartime, made the case that the first casualty
of war is the truth, as usual. Fussell made it clear that there were very few
"heroes" in Europe in World War II. All soldiers were just like him:
when they finally saw the battlefield and experienced its reality, they were all
afraid of dying, and nobody wanted to be a hero. Military indoctrination is designed
to overcome a man's instincts for self-preservation.

Following
orders, being manly, demonizing the enemy, conscription, and only putting young,
naïve, immortal-feeling men into battle, along with severe regimentation, with
rewards and punishments dangled before them, are all tools to overcome a man's
instinct for self-preservation, and his disinclination to kill somebody he has
never met, and who has done him no harm.

Audie
Murphy took on hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near
Holtzwihr France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle
filled with explosives. It stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war.
Gary Wean can vouch for Murphy’s respect for the
common man. Yet, for every Audie Murphy, there were thousands of soldiers who
quickly decided that their only goal was staying alive, and they did not stick
their nose out where it would be shot off. As Fussell related in his own battlefield
experiences, there were no Murphy-esque heroes in his platoon, including himself.
Fussell wrote,

"Although
many in my platoon were killed and wounded, not one was ever captured or ever
ran away, and that was true of F Company as a whole. What did we think we were
doing, and why would we never flee or give up? Some few may have been following
the higher morality and offering their lives and limbs for the Allied cause and
the Four Freedoms, but 90 percent of us were engaged in something much less romantic
and heroic. We were maintaining our self-respect, protecting our manly image
from the contempt of our fellows. By persisting without complaint, we were saving
our families from disgrace. We were maintaining our honor by fulfilling an implied
contract. We were not letting others down. All of us desperately wanted to be
removed from danger, but we now sensed that the war would not end in a few days
and that only death or wounds would be likely to grant us our respite."[3]

Audie
Murphy’s heroic feats were seldom seen in any battle. Mostly there were two armies
facing each other, each terrified of the other, and while their official goal
was killing each other, the primary goal of nearly every soldier was staying alive.
Only the most fanatical (or heroic) soldier thought any differently. The indoctrination
infrastructure and societal systems that put cannon fodder on the front lines
were invisible hands pushing each soldier in the back. Few, if any, soldiers
rushed into battle willingly. Once they got there, they would rather have been
anywhere else. A study of American soldiers during World War II concluded that
what kept the men in combat, once they got there, were two factors: not letting
down their buddies and the risk of their families losing their pay and benefits
if they refused to fight.[4]

In
the United States, ever since the Revolutionary War, the sons of the elite never
served in the infantry unless they wanted to, which was rarely. In the Revolutionary
War, draftees could buy their way out of serving in
the military. In all wars, the rich nearly always found a way out, while
the poor were coaxed or forced into the military. The rich man's exemptions have
always existed in the American military in one form or another, until the present
day. During the Vietnam War, middle and upper class boys got college deferments,
as their parents paid to keep their sons from battle. Poor boys who could not
afford college or were not inclined (college was still a middle to upper class
place to be), found themselves going to Vietnam. There is no valid rationale
for sending an uneducated boy off to war while the college boy stayed in school.
The argument of needing educated soldiers, as if college would magically transform
an 18-year-old boy into a battlefield wizard, is ludicrous, but is the only rationale
possible to justify the college deferment. The real rationale was that the upper
classes could protect their sons that way, while the lower class boys marched
off to battle.

Today it is a "voluntary"
military in America. Today's voluntary U.S. military works for a few reasons.
One is that American soldiers rarely risk their lives anymore. For the past generation,
the United States has only fought weak enemies that cannot fight back. That has
been a conscious decision by the war planners, as the Vietnam War protests demonstrated
that Americans would no longer support having their boys killed in foreign wars
of dubious benefit. Although young boys feel they are immortal, it is harder
to get them to willingly sign up when the odds of being killed are high. They
are not that naïve and ignorant. I probably would have rethought my 1975
application to the Air Force Academy if I had come of age in 1966.

The
military recruiters still play on the "be all that you can be," "be
a man" mentality. They make appeals to manly and patriotic motives, but
the reality is that today's American military, particularly in the army and the
infantry, are largely staffed by America's underclass, and the main reason they
have joined are the economic incentives waved under their noses. With America's
real wages declining since 1973, the military is a viable option for the lower
classes, which is why a disproportionate number of American soldiers are black.
The American black man was ironically transformed from being not good enough to
enjoy the honor of combat, to becoming the preferred infantryman. The underclasses
fighting in the infantry is not something unique to America, but in probably every
military of every people for all of history.

Fussell
was an infantry officer in World War II. Officers usually came from the well-to-do
and educated classes. The infantry cannon fodder was mostly populated by America's
lower classes. Fussell openly speculated that the strategy of staffing the infantry
with the underclass was thinning out their ranks.[5] When men are forced into battlefield situations,
the most fiendish behavior comes out. Fussell witnessed his men slaughtering
surrendering German soldiers with glee, laughing as they wiped
them out. Fussell saw German soldiers being killed by the score, and when
he saw them up close, many appeared about 14 years old.

Fussell
was injured during a bombing attack in France. While no hero, huddling beneath
a hail of bombs going off overhead, shrapnel from a bomb hit him. A sergeant
lying next to him was also hit. Fussell was lucky, and was only hit in the back
and leg. The sergeant and lieutenant lying next to him died immediately.[6]
Fussell went behind the lines to a military hospital while recovering, and developed
the standard crush on his nurse. Fussell recovered and returned to his unit after
the fighting in Europe was over. His unit was surprised to see him, and surprisingly,
his welcome was hostile. Fussell could not understand why he warranted such a
reception from his fellow soldiers. It puzzled him for many years. In the 1990s,
he obtained a document that made the unfriendly treatment by his fellow soldiers
understandable. The sergeant that died next to him, huddled on top of the German
bunker as the bombs exploded overhead, was given a posthumous award of the Silver
Star. The citation stated that the sergeant nearly pulled an Audie Murphy, heroically
taking over command when the platoon's leader was wounded, led his men against
heavy enemy fire, engaged the enemy single-handedly, and while mortally wounded
sent his commander a message regarding the enemy's location.[7]

The
only true parts of that citation were the sergeant's death and that his platoon
leader (Fussell) was wounded. Fussell's platoon concocted a fairy tale of heroism.
Fussell had been lying next to the sergeant when he died, and his platoon knew
that if he discovered their fiction, it might not be pretty. The first casualty
of war is the truth, and even "heroic deeds" may seldom truly be. Fussell
wrote about when the fighting finally ended in Europe. The folks at home in America
cheered wildly, but the feeling on the front was numbness. Eisenhower's mistress
summed up the European attitude when Berlin was finally destroyed:

"No one laughed. No one smiled. It was
all over. We had won, but victory was not anything like what I had thought it
would be. There was a dull bitterness about it. So many deaths. So much destruction.
And everybody was very, very tired."[8]

In
Europe, there was no euphoria regarding winning the "good war." The
American soldiers in Europe were not done. It appeared that the Japanese were
going to suicidally fight to the last man. American soldiers in Europe were praying
that Japan would surrender before they were shipped across the world to fight
another war. A few months later, their prayers were granted when America dropped
two atom bombs on Japanese civilians, ending the war.

When
Germany fell, the concentration camps were opened. Mountains of bodies were accompanied
by mountains of clothing, shoes, glasses, hair, gold fillings, tattooed skin and
other items taken from the Jews and other "subhumans" in the death camps.
It made for stark realizations.

History’s
most intense and bloody warfare was fought between Germany and the Soviet Union
during World War II. The Communist Revolution in Russia quickly degenerated from
an attempt to create an egalitarian society into another power play. There are
many conspiracy theories and controversies regarding that era. One thing is certain:
the "Communists" of the Soviet Union did not govern very wisely. The
reign of Stalin was as bloody as there has ever been. Between his Siberian labor
camps, starvation policies, purges and outright executions, more than ten million
Soviet citizens lost their lives.[9]
Some think that number is too conservative. The Soviet system was evil, but was
hardly the egalitarian system envisioned by Marx. It became another system where
the few benefited at the expense of the majority. Most of those people died before
the Germans showed up.

As Noam Chomsky
and others have made clear, Western Europe and the U.S. did not hate the Communist
regime because of how it treated its citizens, or because the Soviet Union posed
a military threat.[10]The real threat of the Soviet Union was its
rejection of capitalism, where a few rich capitalists got all the chips.
Communism was a major threat to capitalism, especially if it inspired other nations
to drop out of the capitalist system. Adam Smith did not invent capitalism; he
was the first to systematically describe it. He would not have been rapturous
about today’s corporate capitalism. Smith and Marx agreed that the workers should
control the capital. Smith would have probably spoken out strongly against the
global capitalist system that exists today, which is another form of colonialism.
Unfortunately, the Soviet experiment failed in significant ways, and relatively
few Communists got the chips while millions were murdered.

Fascism
was no better. One of the many minimized chapters in American history was an
attempted Fascist coup in 1933.

Brown Shirts in America

Newspaper
baron William Randolph Hearst, who manipulated the Spanish-American
War into being with his yellow journalism, was quite taken with Hitler. Hearst
spent a month in Germany in 1934 and met with Hitler, and was apparently "charmed"
by Der Führer. Hearst's newspapers began running favorable press coverage of
the Third Reich in 1934, when Hearst returned from his delightful meetings with
the Nazis. One of Hearst's guest columnists wrote an article justifying German
rearmament. That guest columnist's name was Hermann
Goering. There is evidence that the Nazis were greasing Hearst's palms for
his sympathetic coverage.[11]

Henry Ford, a notorious
anti-Semite, thought the Third Reich was great. Beginning in 1933 when Hitler
came to power, Germany initiated the Aryanization program. The program was a
financial plundering of Jews, foreshadowing what happened during World War II.
Jewish businessmen wanted out of Germany when Hitler came to power, and the Aryanization
program forced Jews into selling out for bottom dollar. Ford Motor Company eagerly
sidled up to the Aryanization trough if there was a buck to be made from it.[12]
German banks, industrialists and major U.S. trading partners jumped into the Aryanization
program. U.S. investment in Germany increased by 48.5% between 1929 and 1940,
while it declined sharply everywhere else in mainland Europe. Even in Britain,
American investment only increased by 2.6% during the 1930s.[13]

One major financier of the
Third Reich’s rise was Union Banking Corporation, of which Prescott Bush, George
Bush the First’s father, was a director and shareholder. The Bush family rose
to power by being Eastern Establishment sycophants, with Prescott and his father
being little more than errand boys for the Harriman and Rockefeller interests. The U.S. government,
under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized Union Banking Corporation in 1942.
The company’s board was composed of Prescott Bush, Roland Harriman and some outright
Nazis.[14] Prescott Bush
joined Yale’s notorious Skull and Bones Society, due to Rockefeller
and Harriman patronage, and both George Bushes also belong to the club. Prescott’s
contribution to the Skull and Bones Society apparently was raiding Geronimo’s
grave, with Geronimo’s bones now gracing the club’s meeting room (called “The
Tomb”), where they sit among the remains of other obstacles to the American Empire,
such as Pancho Villa’s and probably Omar Torrijos’ (secured by George Bush the
First after he invaded Panama). George Bush the First’s other grandfather was
a wheeler-dealer named George Herbert Walker, who was infamous for his corrupt
dealings, being a front man for Morgan interests, among others. The Rockefeller
Empire got in the same Nazi hot water that Union Banking Corporation
did, although it escaped asset seizure.

Aryanization
companies were formed in Germany, and bonds of those firms were even sold on the
American securities markets, although not advertised as such. The Germans kept
a tight grip on repatriation of profits, so the American firms investing in Germany
had to keep plowing their profits back into the German economy. One of the most
lucrative investments was the Aryanization program, which was where much of the
profits were reinvested. Until 1938, the Aryanization program was "voluntary"
for the Jews. The Third Reich was not closely involved in the Aryanization programs
at first.[15] The people making
the early killing in the Aryanization programs were German bankers, industrialists
and other elites, with their rich buddies from America and elsewhere also feasting.

The
German corporations, clamoring for more cheap slave labor for their factories,
encouraged the slave labor situation in the World War II death camps. The corporations
made a killing with the cheap subhuman slave labor. The German corporations that
eagerly used the slave labor were household names such as Daimler Benz and Siemens.
Germany's industrial giants were using concentration camp labor in hundreds of
factories.[16]

In
the United States, Hitler’s rise was not ominous. It was bad news for the more
than four million Jews living in America, the world's largest concentration of
Jews, but the United States government, the best friend that Jews had in the West,
was silent in the face of what Germany did to its Jews. In 1934 a resolution
was introduced in the United States Senate, asking that august body, along with
the president, to officially express "surprise and pain" at Germany's
treatment of the Jews, and ask for restoration of Jewish rights. The State Department,
well stocked with anti-Semites, "caused this resolution to be buried in committee."[17]

When
Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the United States said it would not sell any more
arms to Italy, but allowed U.S. oil companies to continue their sales of oil to
Italy, which ran its war machine. When the Fascists overthrew the elected and
popular Spanish socialist government, the Roosevelt administration hastily declared
itself neutral. Soon after that act, Hitler and Mussolini's governments gave
Franco massive assistance in enslaving the Spanish population. That situation
of America's active or passive support of Fascist governments in overthrowing
egalitarian social movements, as happened in Spain, was something that America
had been doing to Latin America for generations. It was also a prelude
to the postwar years, where the United States instigated, installed and propped
up some of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictatorships.[18]

Smedley
Butler was one of the most beloved military leaders in American history. Teddy
Roosevelt called him, "The finest fighting man in America." Butler
was known as "the fighting Quaker." Butler was only one of four Americans
ever awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. He tried returning one of
them because he did not feel it was earned, but was instead ordered to wear it.
Rank-and-file American soldiers loved him. Butler helped run the Marines for
a generation, carried a pack and was in the trenches with his troops. Butler
was known for his honesty and appreciation for the common man. In Butler's case,
it was genuine.

Born in 1881, his father
and grandfather were U.S. Congressmen, and Butler was born into the upper class
of Pennsylvania. His family was Quaker, and traced back its Pennsylvania lineage
to the days of William Penn. Although he could have pursued the life of an aristocrat,
Butler evidenced a martial spirit from a young age, and in 1898 enlisted in the
Marines, swept up into the "Remember the Maine" fervor that began the
Spanish-American war. He saw action in Cuba, and his career continued to
the Boxer "Rebellion" in China in 1900, where he was twice wounded with
bullets. His father was influential in the military establishment, as he chaired
the House Naval Affairs Committee and served in Congress for thirty-two years.
Butler then saw action in Nicaragua and Haiti, with a spying interlude in Mexico.
Some of his most celebrated feats were nonviolent, such as when he disarmed one
revolutionary leader and unhorsed another, while he was unarmed.

Butler
was a curious mixture; a Quaker pacifistic background combined with the steely-eyed
visage of a crusading knight. The élan and esprit de corps of the Marines was
his surrogate religion for many years. Partly due to his father's stature, and
partly due to his battlefield heroism, Butler rose through the ranks rapidly.
Butler was outspoken, unrefined, and had a distaste for the "intellectual"
aspect of the military hierarchy. He became a brigadier general before he was
forty, and became a major general about ten years younger than was typical. He
got into hot water regularly with the "brass." He made many enemies,
yet he was an unparalleled leader of the rank-and-file soldier, and regularly
broke regulations in order to get the job done.

He
was "loaned out" from the Marines to Philadelphia in the mid-1920s as
he ran the police and tried enforcing Prohibition. Although Butler drank heavily,
as most Marines did, when he took up the Prohibition cause he never drank again.
He had his fair store of racist sentiments, which were muted for the times, and
he was no pacifist, but he honestly lived by his beliefs.

Near
the end of his career, he began questioning the issue of foreign wars. He began
calling war a racket, and became adamant about the imperialist aspect of the U.S.'
foreign interventions. He was not a pacifist, and came from a long line of republicans.
When he had an opinion, however, he made it known. In 1935, after he retired,
he published a slim book titled War is a Racket. Butler campaigned on that theme
for the rest of his life.

Butler believed
that all U.S. foreign interventions were self-serving acts, which lined the pockets
of the rich at the expense of the nations it victimized, sending young boys to
do the dirty work, wearing American uniforms. People such as Franklin Roosevelt
sidled up to the trough, to "invest" in Haiti after it had been secured
for American interests.[19]Roosevelt drafted the Haitian constitution that
overturned more than a century of Haitian strategy of not allowing foreign land ownership
to gain a foothold in Haiti, which would begin undermining its sovereignty. FDR
was an integral part of the neocolonial strategy of pillaging Haiti. Butler provided
the muscle to pull it off.

Butler's opinions
did not come from reading radical literature, but from his experiences. His correspondence
early in his career complained loud and long when commercial interests and Machiavellian
plotting by his superiors would force him to go back on his word with those he
negotiated with, as in Nicaragua, which he helped plunder, another situation that
continues to this day.[20]
Back then, brute force was yielding to a neocolonial strategy of the Taft administration
known as Dollar Diplomacy, where the U.S. sought to control its subject nations
through economic manipulation rather than marching in the armed forces, as with
Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick Diplomacy. Butler
carried out part of its early implementation. The famous Butler quote, where
he admitted to being an unwitting “gangster for Capitalism”
is vintage Butler.

Although Butler
ran for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania as a Republican, when he began his anti-imperialist
campaign, he did not care to whom he spoke. He ended up speaking at Communist
rallies and at other organizations, which would have given him problems if he
had done it during the Joe McCarthy witch-hunt days. He did not care about ideology.
He believed in telling the truth as he saw it. Whether his audience was made
of communists, veterans groups or the U.S. Congress, his line was the same, with
the honest, outspoken style that made him an American icon, and made him many
powerful enemies.

In 1931, Butler talked informally after a speech, and discussed
how European conquerors became drunk with power and became "mad dogs."
He related an apparently true story told him by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. Vanderbilt
spent time with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and they were driving in an
armored car through the Italian countryside, with Mussolini driving. During their
drive, Mussolini hit and killed a child. Mussolini did not even stop the car,
telling Vanderbilt as he grabbed his knee, "Never look back, Mr. Vanderbilt,
never look back in life."[21]
Mussolini passed off his hit and run incident with the observation that one life
was insignificant when compared to the affairs of state.

Butler's
comments caused an international outcry, and Butler was arrested and court-martialed
and ordered to publicly recant. He never apologized to Mussolini, and instead
retired. Today, Butler looks like a prophet. The incident was the first time
that Mussolini's image was tarnished in America. Back in 1931, Fascism was the
up-and-coming form of government.

Stimson
court-martialed Butler because he and other high-ranking American officials openly
admired Fascism's "great experiment" in Italy. By 1934, the American
ambassador to Italy, Breckenridge Long, President Roosevelt, and famous State
Department negotiator Norman Davis were gushing over what was happening in Italy,
with Roosevelt calling Mussolini an "admirable Italian gentleman" and
the State department praising the sham 1934 Italian election where the Fascists
took 99% of the vote, stating that the election "demonstrate(d) incontestably
the popularity of the Fascist regime."[22]

The
July 1934 issue of Fortune magazine praised Fascism and its quick achievements,
accomplishing in mere years what Christendom could not achieve in millennia.
The article further stated, "The good journalist must recognize in Fascism
certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily
fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory,
Sacrifice."[23]

A
1937 State Department report stated that "Fascism is becoming the soul of
Italy." The Fascist experiment was praised because it "brought order
out of chaos, discipline out of license, and solvency out of bankruptcy."
The report stated that in order to "accomplish so much in a short time severe
measures have been necessary."[24] The State Department
in 1937 saw Fascism as compatible with the United States' interests. Just as
after World War II, the United States would embrace anybody as long as they were
anticommunist.[25] While the Fascists were merely
raping their own people and making the country safe for American investment, the
U.S. government minimized the suffering of that nation's people, and eagerly participated.
With Japan, Germany and Italy, it was only when they began stepping on imperial
toes that it became a matter of war.

When
Butler retired amid the Mussolini furor, he became an even bigger national hero
than before. Although many politicians and industrialists were avid fans of Fascism,
not everybody in America was. The veterans groups lionized Butler, and he was
a big hit on the talk circuit, giving speeches to veterans groups almost daily.
Butler was a paragon to the veterans groups and a populist hero, which made what
happened in 1933 seem strange. A Wall Street bond salesman and former commander
of the Connecticut American Legion approached Butler. Gerald MacGuire had a proposal.
MacGuire said he was acting as a front man for wealthy industrialists and bankers,
and J.P. Morgan, du Pont and other names came up in the conversations. The proposal
was this: Butler would get elected as the American Legion's national commander.
With that office, Butler would have the loyalty of 500,000 veterans. With that
private "army" (du Pont would arm them through their controlling interest
in Remington Arms Company) and up to $300 million of funding made available by
the bankers and industrialists, they would take over the White House.

MacGuire said that the same people with the
money also controlled the press, and would concoct
a rationale that Roosevelt was ill and needed a strongman to help run the country.
The public would easily swallow it, and Butler would be installed in a new cabinet
position as Roosevelt's right hand, in a position dubbed the "Secretary of
General Affairs." MacGuire had been studying the Italian and German Fascist
"miracles," and the plan was closely modeled after Hitler's Brown Shirt
coup. They would ease Roosevelt out of office, and Butler would be America’s
new Hitler.

They picked the wrong man.
Although Butler had been openly critical of Mussolini, they thought that Butler
could be controlled. MacGuire mentioned other candidates they would approach
if Butler turned them down, such as Douglas MacArthur. MacGuire even told Butler
that his superiors doubted that Butler would obediently play the game right, but
nobody else in America could gain the ready allegiance of millions of veterans.
Butler did not say anything publicly and played along, trying to find out more,
such as who was behind it. Butler enlisted Philadelphia Record reporter
Paul French to dig deeper into the situation. Butler introduced French to MacGuire,
and French gained MacGuire's confidence. MacGuire told French the same story
that Butler heard. They tried getting MacGuire to give them more names, but he
was too smart for that. Butler met one rich conspirator who said that he would
spend half his fortune to save the other half.

When
he got all the information he could, Butler went straight to the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1934, telling them all he knew. As with many
other official "investigations," the HUAC was decidedly timid in
pursuing those allegations. They refused to subpoena the names Butler had given
them except for MacGuire, who predictably denied everything. The other names
given by Butler to the HUAC were former-presidential contenders John Davis and
Al Smith (who was a Morgan attorney), and Grayson
Murphy, who was a co-founder of the American Legion, a board member of organizations
such as Morgan Bank, Goodyear and Bethlehem Steel, and MacGuire's boss. The committee,
which went to great lengths to ferret out commies, lost their zeal when confronted
with those rich and powerful names, and largely swept the affair under the carpet.
However, Butler went public. Nevertheless, without official corroboration, no
other investigations were launched, nor did anybody in government appear too concerned.
The establishment and media went out of its way to
either ignore or slam Butler, with Time magazine openly ridiculing him.
The rich conspirator that Butler met threatened to sue Butler for libel, but Butler's
stance on Mussolini showed how easily intimidated he was. The conspirator never
sued, and Butler never backed down.

While
the HUAC's public posture was a quiet folding of its tents, it issued an internal
report to Congress which journalist John Spivak obtained. The HUAC internal report
told a starkly different story. The report to Congress stated that its investigation
confirmed that Butler's story was true in every particular they could verify,
and that MacGuire had perjured himself when he denied it.[26] The truth was
there, even documented in a report to Congress, but it got swept under the rug,
as with most American scandals that involve the rich and powerful. Case closed!

A Brief History of Western Anti-Semitism and the Holy War
Mentality

Another minimized chapter
in American history is that while Hitler was pursuing his Final Solution, anti-Semitism
was reaching its high-water mark in U.S. history. Anti-Semitism in America reached
its highest levels during the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, as it did throughout
the West. Hitler was merely the most extreme of the bunch. One of America's
most prominent historians, the self-taught Barbara Tuchman, described the mood
of the West during those years when she said that with few exceptions, "The
Gentile world…would fundamentally have welcomed the Final Solution."[27]

No nation
has been as intensely racist for as long as the United States has. It is that
way today as I write this, with my nation killing off close to a million children in Iraq. If they
were white children, it would not be happening. When America was killing off
millions of Southeast Asians during the 1960s
and 1970s, America invoked the "mere gook rule" to absolve U.S. soldiers
of legal accountability for their mass murders of natives that they were supposedly
saving.[28] In America
during the 1800s, the surest way to garner votes was to run for office as
an "Indian fighter," which was often a euphemism for killing native
women and children while the men were away on hunting expeditions. When Southern
blacks were finally freed and the Reconstruction government left, blacks
began hanging from trees in the South like Christmas tree ornaments. Lynching
became so popular that late in the 19th century the murderers would
proudly pose next to the dead or burning black man, with women posing too, knowing
that they would never be convicted, even when posing for photos to commemorate
the occasion.[29]
The death squad regimes that the United States has recently supported in places
such as El Salvador, Guatemala
and Indonesia slaughtered non-whites. The United States
will rarely support the slaughter of white people, except in the cancer
racket and other hidden holocausts, but nearly all people of color are fair
game. There was almost undoubtedly a strong racist motivation regarding the United
States' dropping of atom bombs on Japan in 1945.

Here in Washington,
my uncle told me about a place in the mountains called "China Cliff."
Chinese coolies completed the railroad over the mountains, and when it came time
to pay them, the railroad management had them pushed off a cliff into a canyon,
killing hundreds of coolies. Killing them instead of paying them was far cheaper,
and earned the landmark the name of "China Cliff." If that had happened
to white people, there would be a monument erected there. A friend recently told
me of a similar coolie landmark in Idaho, where killing them was cheaper than
paying them.

The United States is a nation
built on the red man’s bones and the sweat and
tears of the black man and other "inferior" races. Our hallowed Declaration of Independence grandly stated
the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. When the even more hallowed
U.S. Constitution was drafted years later, it gave force to those words of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers,
but qualified the sweeping language a little. All white, land-owning men
were created equal. Women, slaves (white and black; white slaves were
dubbed with the euphemistic term, "indentured servants"), natives and
white men who did not own (recently stolen native) land were specifically excluded
from coming to the table and having a hand in their governance. That was a slight
improvement over the European monarchies. Founding Father John Jay voiced the
day's mentality when he said that the people who own the country should run
it. George Washington was reputedly
America’s richest man when he became president, increasing his wealth by stealing
native land. In 1782, Washington devised a plan to steal the native land by forcing
them into signing treaties that the U.S. would
never honor, a strategy quickly adopted by the government, as evidenced by
the fact that historians cannot find one treaty that the United States honored
with Native Americans.

Jews were white
people, sort of. Racism in America has become covert in recent years. There
are not racist laws on the books anymore. America used to have de jure
segregation, now it is de facto. Nobody can publicly spew racist sentiments
unchallenged, which is an improvement, but racism is far from dead in America.
There are no more colored bathrooms, but other measures show how racist America
still is. For instance, when the blacks were freed after the Civil War, their
income was about 20% of white income. By 1900, it was clear up to 30%. Then
the noted racist Woodrow Wilson came into office and reversed the
gains the blacks had made. By 1940, black income was less than it was
in 1900, as a ratio to white income. Then the golden era of black improvement
occurred. Between 1940 and 1970, black income per capita shot up to sixty percent
of white income. It is not coincidental that those economic improvements happened
during the Civil Rights era and unprecedented U.S. global hegemony. From Martin
Luther King's assassination in 1968, until 1990, black family income actually
declined as a ratio of white income. Not only did it decline between 1970
and 1992 relative to white income, it also declined in real dollars.[30] The laws are not explicitly racist anymore, but
the system still churns out the disparity. The blacks won the legal battle, in
a way, but lost the economic one.

In
1940, Jews were a short step above "niggers" in America's hierarchy.
There were many jobs that a Jew could not have in America, similar to the restrictions
they had lived under in Europe for centuries. Similar to signs in the South that
said they did not serve "Negroes," signs on America's East Coast often
said "no Jews allowed." I saw one Jewish woman reminisce about her
childhood, talking about going to an East Coast beach, and the sign said "No
Jews or dogs allowed."[31]
As this essay covers American anti-Semitism, bear in mind Leonard Dinnerstein’s
words as he concluded in his Anti-Semitism in America, published in 1994,

"Anti-Semitism
is unlikely to vanish in the United States. It is too much a part of the Christian
culture to disappear. It must also be emphasized, however, that in no Christian
country has anti-Semitism been weaker than it has been in the United States."[32]

In August 1999, a member of the neonazi Aryan
Nation group shot children at a Jewish school in Los Angeles, killed a Filipino
postman, and was proud of his crimes, calling them a "wake up call for America."
That shooting incident triggered many anti-Semitic acts across America, including
the desecration of synagogues. Fortunately, most Americans were horrified, but
that it even happened shows how far we have to go. In the West before World War
II, the United States was the haven for Jews. Jews were treated better in America
than anyplace else in Europe.

The Jewish
people were originally one of many tribal peoples of the Fertile Crescent. In
about 2000 BC, there was a great invasion
from the steppe regions, and pastoral peoples, with their male, sky-god deities
overthrew the settled agricultural peoples,
with their female, earth-goddess deities. During that time of tumult, many of
the settled peoples of the Fertile Crescent (today’s Iraq and vicinity) migrated
toward the Mediterranean, and a man today known as Abraham migrated with them,
eventually settling in the vicinity of today’s Israel. Abraham also began something
unique, in that he seemed to have a relationship to one god, not the teeming
pantheon of gods that dominated the polytheistic religions of the era.

Those days were during
that region’s Bronze Age, and they were extremely violent. Abraham’s tribe lived
and grew in numbers in their new home, and over the generations they fragmented
into distinct tribes. The peoples the Bible records are the ones that eventually
migrated to Egypt, which had the ancient world’s most reliable food supply. Through
the vagaries of life in Egypt, they eventually became a slave class, and under
their great leader Moses they escaped Egyptian slavery, and wandered for about
fifty years in the Sinai Peninsula. It was during that time that they developed
a definite monotheistic code, as laid down by Moses. It was unique in the ancient
world. Their oral histories tell of their God promising them a land, and under
Moses’ bodyguard Joshua they invaded Cannae, the
slaughter of the citizens of Jericho (perhaps the world’s oldest city) being
the most infamous example of how the “Israelites” secured their “Promised Land.”
That probably happened around 1200 BC. The Jewish belief system, as practiced
through Mosaic Law, created by a law-giving God, established a tribal coherence
that was unique, yet it also made them a target. They saw themselves as God's
chosen people, and often kept themselves rather apart from other tribes. With
their strict dietary laws and rites such as circumcision, they often became outcasts,
and even preferred that status at times.

The
monotheism of the Israelites was also rather hostile to the notion of secular
states, elevating “God’s” laws over the laws of men, which created a tension in
the relations of church and state that continues to this day. The Jewish people
set about conquering/annihilating the inhabitants of their Promised Land, and
their empire-building peaked with David, whose reign ended in about 966 BC. The
Jewish state declined after that, beginning with David’s son Solomon, who began
turning the conquered peoples into slaves, which was repugnant to church leaders
who recalled their people’s days of Egyptian slavery. The church and state dichotomy
went through various shades of unity and separation during those days, as the
Mosaic code did not mesh well with state imperatives. The Israelites battled
their neighbors and went through a long decline. The Assyrian Empire invaded
and conquered the Israelites’ northern lands, climaxing with the conquest of Samaria
in about 721 BC, and carried away ten tribes of Israelites, with their assimilation
into the Assyrian Empire being so complete that those people are lost to history.

The beginning of the Jewish
Diaspora really began when the Babylonians rushed into the void created by the
Assyrian Empire’s defeat, and conquered Jerusalem, which the Assyrians never accomplished.
In 597 BC, the first Jewish elites were forced
to migrate to Babylon, which began the Jewish Diaspora. The Babylonian Exile
lasted until the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and
the Jews were free to go home. Most preferred to stay, however, and Babylon became
a center of Jewish culture for more than a millennium. Cyrus was a student of
Zoroaster’s teachings, and the dualistic nature (good/evil) of Judeo-Christian
thought came from Zoroaster.

In those
lands of rising and falling empires, the Greeks made their ascendance after the
Persians sacked Athens in 480 BC. The Greek classic period peaked in about 432
BC, just before their Peloponnesian War that began in 431, with a resulting epidemic
in 430 that carried off about a third of Athens’ population. Greek culture, although
early Greek writers looked up to Moses and other Jewish leaders, was markedly
different than Jewish culture, the Greeks becoming the West’s first humanists.
Greek culture was very assimilative, and it readily adopted foreign gods into
its pantheon, even deifying men who lived exemplary lives. Under the Macedonian
Alexander the Great, whose reign conquered lands from Egypt to Persia and peaked
in about 326 BC, as he even conquered part of India, Greek (Hellenistic) culture
spread far and wide. Jewish culture began assimilating into Greek culture, especially
among its far-flung Diaspora. The Jewish homeland, however, was less cosmopolitan
and more orthodox in its religious practice, and great division arose within the
Jewish people, with those who wanted to “modernize” on one end of the spectrum,
and those who tried keeping Judaism “pure” on the other.

The
antagonism between Greek and Jewish culture became heated by 150 BC, especially
as the Greek culture “conquered” the Roman one, with Rome assimilating Greek culture
after it conquered them. Greek eventually became the official language of the
Byzantine Empire, and was the official language in some Roman provinces in Jesus’
day. By the time of Jesus, Greek culture was so dominant that the New Testament
was entirely written in Greek, and the names Jesus and Mary are Greek versions
of their Hebrew names Joshua and Miriam.

The
Roman Empire conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC. The Jews had a prophetic tradition
that a messiah would one day appear to deliver them. They believed that their
messiah would be a king to lead great armies to destroy their enemies. Well,
their messiah probably did appear. Instead of a righteous warrior king,
along came a crazy Jew who had a strategy for eradicating the enemy by a method
never tried before: loving the enemy. Even today, such an idea is crazy,
virtually never even attempted in the intervening two thousand years. Although
he gave incredible demonstrations of the power of love, demonstrations that are
called miracles today, his message of love was so bizarre that it was largely
rejected. He had followers, but the one who became the most famous corrupted
his message. The "good news" was the infinite love of God, not Jesus,
a distinction that Paul did not appreciate, nor did the religion that he founded
in Jesus' name: Christianity. Jesus’ message was love, the greatest message ever
told. It did not completely fall on deaf ears, but his message gradually became
corrupted, beginning with Paul who altered the good news from Jesus into
the good news about Jesus.

Ignoring
Jesus' message about loving the enemy, the Jewish revolt in 66 AD brought the
Roman fist down on the Jews. Jews had already been dispersed throughout the Roman
Empire (about 70% of the world’s estimated eight million Jews of the day lived
outside Palestine), but the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD, turning it into
an official part of the Roman Empire, dispersed the Jews throughout the Mediterranean
periphery and into today’s France and Spain. The Jewish dispersal also dispersed
the new cult known as Christianity. In great irony, the "Good Book"
of the Christians was a book written by Jews about Jews. The Old Testament is
a Jewish history book. Jesus, Paul and John the Baptist were all Jews. The first
Christians were Jews, and they spread Christianity. Through a series of tragic
events, the people who embraced the teachings of a radical Jew, as taught by his
Jewish followers, developed a hatred for the very people who produced such a master
and teaching. Christians took to heart the Jewish history book and the teachings
of their greatest prophet, but had no use for the people themselves.

Jews
were largely scattered throughout the Roman Empire, although a fair number migrated
to Arab lands in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. In those early days of Christianity,
the Roman Empire was officially pagan, which generally meant that any belief was
fine as long as people bent their knees to the emperor. What got the early Christians
thrown to the lions was not their faith, per se. They put their faith and God
higher in their esteem than the emperor, and their radical politics earned
them the empire's enmity. They originally lived communally and austerely, sharing
their possessions with each other, something quite out of step with the times.[33]
They also condemned paganism as wicked, which won them few friends. Christianity
was not very old before it became a ruling class religion. Early Christian figures
such as Paul, Augustine, Origen, Ambrose and Jerome were either from the ruling
class or catered to them.[34]

Christianity
was originally a radical Jewish splinter sect, which became many splinter sects,
adopted by non-Jews as well, especially the hated Greeks. The first revolt ended
badly, capped off with the mass suicide at Masada in 72 AD. The Roman army crushed
a second revolt in 135 AD, which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. The revolts
not only scattered the Jews, but also created a lasting rift between radical Jewish
Christians and old line Jews, and set in motion dynamics that plague Christian-Jewish
relations to this day.

Early Christianity
was diverse. By the year 200 AD, there were about forty Christian sects. There
were about twenty different versions of the crucifixion drama circulating
in those sects: Jesus died on the cross, he survived crucifixion, he was not crucified,
the Romans were behind it instead of the Jews, and so forth. Those forty sects
were not one big happy family. One Roman observer said that nobody hated Christians
more than other Christians. Each sect had its own holy writings that justified
its views, and they often thought the other sects were wrong.

Until
Constantine organized the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, there was not appreciable
unity within Christianity. The likely reason that Constantine chose Christianity
as the state religion was to unite the slowly disintegrating empire under one
faith, to help hold it together.[35]
Christianity had become successful enough that it was a logical candidate, and
made an unprecedented rise from an obscure, marginal, radical movement, with more
than forty sects, often battling with each other, to becoming the state religion.
After the Nicean Council, Christianity became the Roman Empire's state religion.
Many suspect that the Nicean Council is where a great deal of editing happened.
There had to be one story, not many competing versions. The official story today
is that the books of the New Testament were chosen based on how authentic they
were, but there is plenty of evidence that political expediency and power issues
had much to do with it.[36]
A primary thrust of the Nicean Council was condemning a Christian sect called
Arianism, which believed that God was the highest power, and Jesus, being a Son
of God, was of lesser stature. The Arian belief was largely responsible for the
idea of a Holy Trinity (one of many Christian beliefs that are not in the
scriptures), and the Nicene Creed was a direct response to Arian belief, as it
stated that Jesus was God.[37]

Condemning
Arianism, the Christian hierarchy nevertheless attempted to unite the faith.
The documentation regarding that first council is sparse, but many suspect that
writings not deemed politically acceptable were edited out of the Bible at the
first council. Writings may have also been inserted to further the day's political
goals. By burning the pagan works (including all the Classical Greek ones), Cathar
writings, ancient libraries, the Aztec and Mayan books and so on, the Church was
effective at completely eradicating what it did not approve, leaving historians
scratching their heads, wondering how much was lost in the Catholic bonfires.
It is argued that the Church's eradication philosophy is mainly what brought on
the Dark Ages.[38]
There is little overt evidence of what happened to the New Testament, but plenty
of suspicious evidence. Probably the greatest evidence is the ungainly hole in
Jesus' life. Sunday school children are told that Jesus spent his teenage and
early adult years working as a carpenter. The New Testament gives zero
evidence for such a belief. From age twelve to thirty, there is not one word
about what Jesus was doing with his life. More than half of Jesus' life is missing.
It vanished.

My mystical
sources have long told me that the Council of Nicea was where much of Jesus'
life was "weeded out" of the New Testament. That was partly because
he spent those "lost" years traveling the world on his spiritual pilgrimage.
He attained his enlightenment outside of the Roman Empire, gaining valuable insights
from the Buddhaic and Hindu masters of the East, with their ideas of reincarnation
and other ideas that were unacceptable to the imperial religion.[39]

Thusly
did Jesus' life and teachings make it to the big time, although what it became
was probably nearly unrecognizable to Jesus. Yet, in its core, it was still about
love. The adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire was not as easy as Constantine
may have hoped. His successors fought for years over the issue of Christianity,
and Christianity and Paganism went at it tooth and nail at times, and Christianity
prevailed. In the end, Christianity adopted many of the Pagan rites, partly to
market it, further altering Christianity.

There
is only one word worth remembering about Jesus' life: love. Using ancient teachings
to justify judging, killing, punishing or oppressing people is not enlightened.
It is not what one believes that gets them into “heaven,” so much as it is how
they act. All religions are corrupted, not just Christianity. The
Dalai Lama may have said it best when he said, "My religion is kindness."

Regarding
holy words, it is instructive to recall that neither Jesus nor Buddha left behind
any writings. Spiritual teachings have stated that when the master has left earthly
life behind, the teaching is finished, and any writings left behind belong to
the realm of philosophical literature, not the basis of religions. Jesus and
Buddha cannot have believed much in the holiness of written words if they did
not leave any behind.

Early
Christians were persecuted and killed, which was typical in those days.
The Coliseum, along with other arenas around the empire, was the site of constant
bloodbaths. The Roman equivalent of going to the movies was going to the arenas
and watching staged battles, put on for the masses' entertainment, a tradition
that lasted for about 1000 years in that region. The prime attraction at the
arenas was gladiatorial combat. Originally an Etruscan funerary rite, gladiatorial
combat evolved into the Roman Empire’s primary entertainment. The gladiators
were usually slaves, one of many slave classes in the Roman Empire, which meant
that they were people conquered and captured by Rome's armies. They were trained
for battle in the arena. While one-on-one combat was most common, group battles
could become extravaganzas. Augustus Caesar once had 10,000 men fight each other
in eight battles. The battles were usually to the death.

Roman
historian Michael Grant noted that history's "two most quantitatively destructive
institutions are Nazism and the Roman gladiators."[40] Any appreciative
musings about Roman achievements in the area of law, architecture, economics and
other "advances" of civilization need to be tempered by considering
the unparalleled evil of forcing people to murder each other…for entertainment.
The Romans themselves were not too proud of that form of entertainment, as imperial
Roman coinage, which depicted all manner of Roman life and culture, never portrayed
gladiatorial combat.[41]

The
thumbs up, thumbs down gesture came from those times, when a gladiator might be
spared if he fought valiantly enough. So the audience would not become bored,
the events were creative. People fought lions, tigers and bulls. Fights were
staged with lion against tiger, elephant against rhinoceros, bear against water
buffalo. Other novel offerings were dwarves and cripples against women. The
Coliseum could be filled with water for naval battles. A gladiator was nearly
always doomed to an eventual death in the arena, although many killed themselves
first. If a gladiator became the day's "hero," he would be showered
with gifts and applause, only to go into battle the next day. Sometimes it was
declared that no warrior would be allowed to survive the day, and every one would
have to fight to the death.[42] Few survived long enough to "retire."
That was the favored entertainment of the day. Criminals and Christians
were among those condemned to die in the arena. Few Romans ever complained or
questioned the nature of that entertainment.[43]
In those times, cruelty and bloodshed was equated with fun. The more cruel a
spectacle was, the more the crowd liked it.[44]

What
is generally credited with the end of gladiatorial combat was the spread of Christianity,
although it was far from an immediate effect. Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity
the state religion, issued an edict forbidding gladiatorial combat in 326 AD,
the year after the Nicean Council, but he never enforced the order. Constantine
was hardly a "good Christian," having both his wife and son executed,
his wife by boiling her. Constantine staged some of the gorier spectacles that
ever graced the Coliseum. For Constantine, Christianity was a strictly political
matter. In 404 AD, a Christian monk from Asia Minor apparently leapt into the
arena to try separating the combatants, and the enraged crowd tore the man to
pieces. Gladiatorial combat was not finally abolished until 681 AD.[45]

The
earliest Christians were Jews, and Rome considered Christians a Jewish sect.
By 212 AD, Jews became imperial citizens, and their life was as good as the times
could dictate, until Constantine made Christianity into the state religion in
325 AD. Then the Jews began a hard ride. Although the Christian hierarchy at
the time did not advocate anti-Jew violence, Christian mobs regularly burned down
synagogues. Babylonia, outside of Christian and Roman influence, became the center
of Judaism by 300 AD. Pagans were being wiped out too, even while Christianity
appropriated many of its customs. Christian intolerance replaced the laissez
faire spirituality that characterized pre-Christian Rome.

Power
corrupts, and as the Christian church became more powerful, pagans and Mosaic
Law Jews paid heavily. Constantine's ploy was not very successful, as the Western
Roman Empire crumbled in 476 AD.

Jews
were dispersed across the Roman Empire and further, and when the Empire collapsed,
the Catholic Church became Europe’s unifying institution. It was a different
kind of Roman Empire. For all its spectacular failures and the great evils it
would eventually wreak on its subjects, the Catholic Church may have held European
civilization together for the next five hundred years.

As
the Catholic Church gained in strength as the state church, it became increasingly
bigoted and racist. Although three early popes were black Africans (Miltiades,
Victor 1, and Gelasius 1; saints Augustine and Benedict were also black) the Church
became decidedly racist, and Vatican artists later "whited out" those
African popes and saints.

When the Western
Empire crumbled, the Eastern Empire, under almost wholly Greek influence, was
not inviting, so Babylonia became the center of the Jewish world. Around 600
AD another radical splinter sect of Judaism took root, led by a prophet named
Muhammad. He was more the messiah that the Jews originally sought: a sword-wielding
destroyer of his enemies, but one who also lived by a moral code, conversed with
his God, and the religion of Islam took root and swept the Arab lands and further.
Although Muhammad killed his fair share of Jews, they were treated far better
by the Islamic code than the Christian one in those days. Although the spread
of Islam was often bloody, and conversion by the sword was sometimes a method
of Islamic proselytizing, it was a decidedly color-blind faith, which was part
of its appeal to people of color. The rapid expansion of the Islamic faith in
the 600s and 700s brought many Jews under Islamic rule. Jews existed more peacefully
under Islamic rule than Christian rule, and consequently they lived in greater
numbers in the Islamic world than the Christian one. Islam conquered the Mediterranean’s
southern periphery, all the way into today's Spain.

In
711 AD, Islamic armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula, which eventually established
Moorish rule. Jews of the peninsula had been suffering under the cruel rule of
the Visigothic kings, who practiced forced conversion and executed those who remained
"secret Jews." Those dynamics reappeared several centuries later.
When Islamic armies overran the Iberian Peninsula, Jews were fighting right beside
them. Under the subsequent Umayyad dynasty, Jews flourished as nowhere else.
In Babylonia, they were still subject to persecution from the local rulers, but
under Umayyad rule on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews lived in a golden age.
Life under the Umayyad dynasty in Moorish Spain was as good as Jews would have
it until the nineteenth century.

By
1000 AD, Jews were widely scattered across Europe and the Middle East (even China),
and Córdoba (Spain) became the most prosperous center of Jewish life, and Europe’s
most civilized place. Until around 1000 AD, relative harmony existed between
Jews, Muslims and Christians. Unfortunately for the Jews, the Christian and Islamic
worlds would soon make their lives more precarious. One of the earliest expulsions of Jews in Europe was from the
Rhineland in 1012. Jews did not come to the British Isles until William the Conqueror
invaded them in 1066.

Violent
Berber Muslims made their play for power, seizing Córdoba. When the Umayyad dynasty
ended in 1036, Moorish Spain splintered into fractious petty kingdoms. In 1056
the Christian Reconquest was initiated, and Toledo was retaken in 1085. During
the Reconquest, the Iberian Peninsula degenerated into a militarized
land, with constant wars, not only between the Christians and Moors, but the
Moors became mutually hostile and warred against each other. Soldiers became
more important than poets, and life became harder for Jews as well. Virulent
outbreaks of Islamic fundamentalism marred the times. In 1066, Islamic preachers
incited the slaughter of about 5000 Jews in Granada, claiming that they had too
much influence. Although Jews generally had a better life in Islamic cultures,
there were slaughters of Jews across the Islamic world from time to time, mainly
in North Africa. Although Jews were "People of the Book" and had theoretically
protected status, they were still a minority and held to be inferior to the Islamic
overlords.

The rise of Europe as a cohesive entity took shape around
that time, and the first Crusade of 1096 can be seen as the first act that "Europe"
took. Europe began seeing itself as one people, united by Christian faith and
white skin. By that time, the Catholic Church had become a great temporal power
as well as religious institution, owning about a quarter of Europe's land. Tales
were told of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land being mistreated by Islamic people.
Since Jews lived in the Holy Land also, Christians in those days barely distinguished
the two. During friction between the Eastern Roman Empire and Turkey, Pope Urban
II initiated the first Crusade in 1096, whipping up European Christians to go
battle the Turks. As the Europeans were riled up to do battle, the soldiers made
a detour before "liberating" parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that
the Turks had taken. Beginning in France and soon spreading to Germany, the Crusaders
engaged in what is considered the first holocaust of European Jews by Christians.
In a frenzy of bloodlust, the Christian soldiers engaged in mass murders of Jews.
As many as 8000 Jews perished in the massacres.[46]

From
that time forward, Jews would no longer be safe in Europe. There had been slaughters
of Jews before, many times, but that part of the world was very violent. The
massacres of 1096 were the first with a decidedly religious, anti-Jewish fervor.
That first Crusade was the most successful, and was a thoroughly imperial venture
that climaxed in "liberating" Jerusalem from the Muslims. Christian
fanaticism fueled the fire of those marching hordes. The Crusaders laid siege
to the Holy City, and when they breached the walls they massacred nearly every
inhabitant. The city was bathed in infidel blood. It was an Old Testament-style
bloodbath. One could not walk through the city without walking on bodies, sloshing
through pools of blood and navigating heaps of severed heads. As when Joshua’s
Jews laid waste to Jericho, the Crusaders turned the slaughter into a sacred
affair, the knights “sobbed for excesses of joy” as they bathed in infidel blood,
cooked up Muslims and ate them, and other wonders. Those are not “Black
Legend”-ish allegations, but events proudly written up by the Crusaders and
their chroniclers themselves.[47]

In
England in 1144 were recorded the first European accusations that the Jews killed
babies in their rituals.[48] That accusation took on a life of its own, inciting
mass murders of Jews in England, especially around Crusade time. The
accusation of ritually murdering children is an old one, often combined with cannibalism
and/or drinking their blood. Ironically, Roman pagans accused the new cult of
Christianity of the very same crime.[49]

While
Jews were being massacred in England and France regularly, the first Jewish expulsion
in France occurred in 1182 after closing the Jewish academy in Paris. While European
anti-Semitism began rearing its head, the Catholic Church was becoming thoroughly
corrupt. Popes were leading Crusade after Crusade, Pope Innocent III calling
for the fourth Crusade in 1199. There were also minor Crusades being mounted
throughout Europe. The concept of Christian armies marauding through Europe was
becoming ingrained, and the idea of a perpetual Crusade took root. Christianity
was becoming the polar opposite of Jesus' teachings.

By
the early 1200s, the Church was thoroughly corrupt and there were attempts made
at reform. The Council of Evreux in 1195 mentioned the selling of indulgences
by the clergy, and bishops selling holy oil and relics. The Council of Avignon
in 1209 mentions a priest who diced with his parishioners regarding their penances
(double or nothing?), and priests opening taverns with a priest collar as the
inn sign. Priests had families, lovers and concubines, and drank heavily, hunted
and gambled with abandon.[50]

When
the Christian Crusaders showed up in Constantinople to "help" in 1096,
their Byzantine "hosts" were shocked, and saw their European "allies"
as uncouth and barbaric backwoods rubes, as their most pronounced characteristics
were their filthiness, fanaticism and violence. The Hellenistic culture of the
Eastern Roman Empire was far more refined than European culture.

While
the Church was becoming increasingly degraded, the Islamic culture pursued a different
path. By about 1200, the Islamic culture may have had the world's highest standard
of living (the only “competitor” for the title would have been China). The Arabic
Islamic culture emphasized learning and built some of the world's greatest libraries.
The Catholic Church specialized in burning libraries. The West knows about the
ancient Greek philosophers and culture largely because their work was preserved
in Islamic libraries. The Catholic Church spent centuries eradicating any literature
considered pagan or heretical, and all the Hellenistic writings in Europe were
consigned to the flames.

The Church's
intolerance would express itself quite violently after 1200 AD. Not only was
the Church mounting Crusade after Crusade, its priestly ranks were filled with
corruption, and Jews and Islamic people were not the only people on the Church's
hit list. Because of the wholesale corruption and debauchery of European Christianity,
with Crusades becoming perpetual, with gambling, drunken, philandering priests
and the like, the Catholic Church did not inspire much obeisance from the flock.
In France, while Jews were having a rough ride, there were two movements that
tried getting back to the spiritual roots that the Catholic Church had largely
forsaken.

In 1175
in Lyons France, Peter Waldo (or Valdés) sought the meaning of God, and was told
by a theologian to sell what he had, give it to the poor, and follow Christ.
Waldo did just that. His fervent passion for the essence of Christianity gave
birth to a new religious movement. His followers were originally known as the
"Poor Men of Lyons," and they eventually adopted Waldo's name, becoming
Waldensians. Waldo was a devout Christian; too devout. He originally tried reforming
the Church, bringing it back to its humble roots. The Church would not tolerate
it, and Pope Lucius III excommunicated Waldo in 1184. In that same year, Lucius
III issued a bull ordering bishops to "direct inquisitions" on heresy.
The roots of the Inquisition are in Roman law, where the inquisitio, originally
a routine act of Roman judicial investigation, degenerated into torturing confessions
out of suspected criminals.[51] The ancient Roman practice was
revived to deal with heresy. Heresy was usually nothing more than refusing to
be an obedient subject of the Church.

Waldo
and his movement was a thorn in the Church's side, but there was a much greater
threat to the Church's religious monopoly: the Cathars. Unfortunately, there
are no Cathar writings extant. Nearly all that is known about them derives from
reading the attacks of Catholic scholars.[52]

The
popularity of the Cathars and Waldensians was partly due to the Catholic Church's
spiritual bankruptcy. The Cathars exceeded the austere mien of the Waldensians.
Their creed was dualistic, meaning that they believed in a good god in heaven
and an evil god who ran earth. It is said that they were not really Christians,
but that is misleading. A number of early Christian sects were also dualistic,
such as the Gnostics. The dualistic aspect of Gnostic philosophy was older than
Christianity. It can be argued that the dualistic creed of the Gnostics and Cathars
was Christian in that it centered on Jesus. The Gnostics considered themselves
Christians, as did the Cathars. The Gnostic philosophy antagonized other Christian
sects, and the Gnostic sects lost the political battle of what Christianity would
become. What is called Christianity today is merely the victorious viewpoint
of the most powerful Christian sects, especially the one aligned with the Roman
Empire’s might. Gnostic texts were carefully excluded from the New Testament,
such as the gospels of Thomas, Peter, Mary, Philip, Nicodemus and the Gospel of
Truth. Dualistic thought is prominent in the Bible, especially in the New Testament,
with apocalyptic struggles of good against evil becoming the philosophical underpinnings
of Christian institutions such as the Crusades and the Inquisition.[53]

The
Cathars were dualistic, but so is any Christian who believes that the devil is
influential on earth. In theory, there is a distinction between the two. In
the standard Christian view, God created all, and Satan was a fallen angel. Satan
is not a creator as such, but a corrupter. The agent of darkness that the Gnostics,
Manicheans and Cathars believed in was a creator in its own right. A good god
ran heaven, and a dark god ran the physical world. Theologians have spent centuries
arguing such matters, but if the evil is due to Satan or a dark creator is a relatively
fine distinction, and in practice, the difference is on the order of splitting
hairs. How one deals with the darkness is all-important.

Manicheanism
was a bona fide world religion, comparable to Christianity or Islam. Mani founded
it in the late 200s AD, and it was an amalgam of Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism
and elements from other religions. Mani pursued a consciously syncretic attempt
at a universal religion. The religion he founded flourished in the Middle East
and Central Asia, and even spread to China. The Manicheans practiced one of the
gentlest religions. Believing matter to have inherent darkness within it, yet
with God's light inside also, the Manichees killed no animals, ate no animal flesh,
and cultivated melons as a staple, as they would not kill the plant to gain the
melon. They even apologized to their bread as they ate it. As with the Gnostics,
women had a prominent place in Mani's religion, able to become the "elect,"
(the priest class, but they could not take office…not being entirely free from
the day’s misogyny).

Christian doctrine
states that souls are tainted with original sin. The Manichean doctrine stated
that the only taint was from being in a physical body. The soul was untainted,
and the path to salvation was through "gnosis," which means "knowing."
Awakening the soul and purifying the inherent light in matter, sending it back
to its source, were the goals of Manichean practice. As with all religions, Manicheanism
devolved when it mistook the symbolic for the literal, or when it proposed spiritual
regulations, with their inevitable dos and don'ts. Yet, a religion whose central
tenet was causing no harm to living beings gets high marks, and they apparently
lived by it. While the Catholic Church devolved to granting salvation to those
who paid enough money, the Manichean faith largely avoided that corruption, although
the faith had the "hearers" (similar to "the flock," in Christianity)
financially support the "elect" (such as the priests).

Manicheans
were first persecuted by the Roman Empire in about 300 AD. They were treated
worse than Christians. The totalitarian nature of Christianity could not abide
Manicheanism either, and as Christianity became allied with the Roman Empire,
the Manicheans, like the Pagans and others, became the object of Christian destructive
zeal. Long after Manicheanism had been eradicated in the Christian world, it
continued flourishing in Asia, and the religion lasted for more than a thousand
years before finally being wiped out.[54]

The world would be a gentler place if religions
such as Manicheanism were not destroyed. As with other extinct religions, the
Manicheans are not here to defend themselves, and until recently, the West knew
of the Manichees largely by reading Christian polemics against them, which surely
did not provide a sympathetic or balanced view. Mani, unlike Buddha or Jesus,
put his words on paper and tried founding a religion, although modern scholars
still do not know how he exactly practiced his craft. Apparently he could tailor
it to his audience, be they Buddhist, Christian, or of any religion. Manichean
missionaries, partly because of their syncretic views, were more successful in
their recruiting efforts than their Christian counterparts. Christianity prevailed
largely due to brute force and the temporal power it cultivated.

The
Cathars followed in the tradition of Gnostics and Manicheans. The Cathars followed
Jesus' living example the best they could, and took it to greater extremes. Cathars
would not willingly kill any living thing, and the most accomplished Cathars,
the Perfecti, fasted three times a year for forty days each and were celibate,
similar to the Manichean Electi. The Cathar faith was an ideological descendant
of Manicheanism. So were the Bogomils and Paulicians. The Cathars' most devout
members would not even eat eggs, milk or cheese, "unclean" foods that
were associated with procreation. The Perfecti lived the simple and austere
life that Christians imagined Jesus lived, and their no meat and no wine policy
took it further than Jesus did. Again, no Cathar writings have survived the Inquisition's
bonfires. Cathar critics stated that the Cathars did not even believe in procreation,
which led the great Inquisition historian Henry Lea to state that the Church's
attack on the Cathars was probably justified because a few generations of Catharist
abstinence would extinguish the species. The Manicheans apparently discouraged
having children, although marriage was fine for the "hearers," and even
keeping mistresses, as Saint Augustine did when he practiced the Manichee faith.[55] Procreation was discouraged but
not forbidden, particularly as Manicheanism was a pacifistic religion.
They indeed were austere ascetics, but there is more to intrigue about their faith
than there is to deplore. Manicheans considered themselves Christian.

It is possible that their critics, to make
them seem crazy, exaggerated their austerity. The Western mentality for millennia
has been a bizarre and fanatical denial of the flesh, as demonstrated by the self-tortures
that priests and nuns inflicted on themselves. It is perhaps too convenient
that the Cathars were accused of autogenocide as a rationale for eradicating them.

The Cathar faith apparently came from the Balkan
region, probably as a side effect of the Crusades, arriving with returning soldiers.[56] The Cathar faith
spread rapidly in France. The Perfecti attained an outward holiness that
made all priestly piousness pale beside it.

Catharism
and Waldensianism spread like wildfire throughout France. In parts of France,
half the population became Cathar. The Catholic Church saw that development as
a threat. Various analyses justify the Catholic Church's position toward the
Cathars as "defending" itself from Cathar attacks, or defending the
entire European worldview from such an affront. It appears that the "threat"
was more like the threat the Washington electric companies felt when Dennis
Lee appeared on the scene with a superior energy conservation technology.
The main Cathar threat was that the Catholic Church's pews would become empty,
and their coffers would no longer be filled. Much of the spiritual and cultural
theorizing is probably a smokescreen to disguise the dictates of raw power. The
Cathars were a threat to the racket.

Innocent's strategy was one that businessmen can appreciate:
put cement shoes on the competition while simultaneously marketing an ersatz version
of their product. In the span of a few years, Innocent authorized the establishment
of two new priestly orders. He authorized the Franciscans in 1209, and in 1214
the Dominican order was founded, officially approved by Innocent's successor in
1216. Those were the first two mendicant orders founded by the Catholic Church.
As with the Cathars and Waldensians, the priests of the new orders took vows of
poverty. In 1204, Innocent tried getting the Cistercians
to preach against the Cathars. The Cistercians were founded during the first
Crusade, in 1098, and were the dominant order of the 1100s. They originally had
ascetic ideals, but were not mendicants, and when 1200 rolled around their mission
had changed significantly. Forty-eight knights joined the Cistercian order in
1112, led by the man who became Saint Bernard. The notion of the oxymoronic monk-like,
chivalrous knights, already on the rise, became more popular. In 1119, the Knights
Templars were formed in Jerusalem. The Cistercians were not the ideal monks to
counter Cathar preachings. Dominic tried bringing Cathars back to the Catholic
fold in 1205.

Dominic had limited success,
but his order became the Catholic Church's priestly army. In 1208, Innocent called
for a Crusade on France to stamp out the heresy of Waldensians and Cathars. In
1209, the Crusade’s purpose was made evident when the Catholic army, led by the
Abbott of Citeaux, Arnauld-Amalric, surrounded the city of Béziers. When asked
how to distinguish faithful Catholics from heretics, the Abbott allegedly told
his Christian soldiers to "Kill them all; God will know his own."[57] The army, so instructed, proceeded to kill every
resident of the city. Estimates range from 7000 to 20,000 people dying in that
slaughter.

The irony can be overwhelming.
The Cathars were devout pacifists. They rarely put up any resistance. Many fled
across Europe, making the murderous Christian task more difficult. Early Christians
in the Roman Empire were also noted for their pacifistic non-resistance to Roman
violence. A thousand years later, the Christians were the butchers, doing the
same thing to those non-resisting Cathars. Burning the Cathars alive was a favored
method of dealing with them, especially the Perfecti. The awesome violence
that the Crusading army inflicted on the local populace was a method of terror,
a timeless and effective method of pacifying the population, making examples out
of the disobedient. The Albigensian Crusade waxed and waned in France for decades,
and entire regions were depopulated. Perhaps a million people died in the Albigensian
Crusade. The massacre at Montsegur occurred in 1247, which nearly put the last
nail in the coffin of Catharism. Crusades were nearly a constant in those days,
marching back and forth across Europe and into the Holy Land, in an unending orgy
of bloodshed. Jews were being slaughtered, but Christian was slaughtering Christian
also, something Jews and Muslims had difficulty comprehending at times. Jews were banned from France in 1254, and expelled from England
in 1290.

One of Innocent's last acts was convening the Fourth Lateran
Council in 1215, perhaps the single-most ambitious conference in Christian history.
Innocent tried reforming the church, restating the faith, calling for a new Crusade,
and making annual reception of Holy Communion and confession a requirement for
all Catholics. Innocent also raised Church taxes, condemned the Waldensians and
Cathars, and made a further definition of heresy and how to deal with it. One
of that council's edicts was forcing Jews and Muslims to wear clothing that marked
them as non-Christian, something the Nazis would do much later. Although Innocent
was responsible for initiating endless bloodshed with his Crusading zeal and political
machinations, he did not initiate the Inquisition, as such. A series of bulls
by Pope Gregory IX in the late 1220s and early 1230s further established the concept
of the Inquisition, and by 1260 the Inquisition was rolling along. Dominicans
and Franciscans usually ran the Inquisitions. There was not yet a central Holy
Office as such, but the Inquisition was known and feared. Mendicant friars became
the scourge of heretics. The almost total annihilation of Cathars by 1250 had
eliminated the direst threat to the religious monopoly, and the Inquisition became
a standard feature throughout Europe, where it was needed to keep the restive
flock in line.

During
the second half of the 1200s, Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas wrote what many consider
the greatest works in Catholic history. His work also further solidified the
Inquisition’s philosophical underpinning, and helped set the stage for later witch
hunts.

The Catholic Church may have
helped hold Europe together back then, similar to Constantine's strategy of using
Christianity to hold the Roman Empire together, with the Catholic Church being
Europe’s only unifying institution. The Church often vied with kings and emperors
for power, in an intricate dance that characterized Europe for centuries. Charlemagne
formed the Holy Roman Empire during the 700s, which became an attempt to revive
the union of Church and state that Rome had for a short time. For the next thousand
years, European nations and the Catholic Church had a wide spectrum of interaction,
the Church often bringing the rulers to heel, but eventually losing power struggles
with the Protestant Reformation.

The
fate of European Jews was often the subject of European caprice. When times got
bad, the Jews suffered for it. The 1200s, for all its bloodshed, possessed a
pastoral calm compared to the 1300s. In the 1300s, warfare, famine and disease
swept back and forth across Europe constantly. The
Black Death swept across Asia from China. It killed tens of millions of people,
with a third of China, a third of the Muslim world and a third of Europe dying,
producing the greatest carnage in Europe in 1348-1349. Europe’s response to the
Black Death was blaming Jews for introducing it. Tens of thousands of Jews were
burned alive for "bringing" the plague to Europe, as well as lepers
and other outcasts. Church policies fomented anti-Semitism, but when the mobs
began murdering Jews, Church officials often tried preventing them. Church officials
abetting anti-Semitism were usually not the same ones who tried saving Jews from
the mobs.

Franciscans were the scourge
of Jews in those days. Jews were restricted from numerous professions, but in
one profession their religion and the Christian religion meshed. According to
the Biblical code that guided Christians, they could not lend money and earn interest.
The Jewish code allowed them to earn interest on money lent to "strangers,"
which came to mean non-Jews, and that was how the Jews became bankers and the
source of many conspiracy theories.[58]

With
all the anti-Jewish violence in Europe, European Jews fled to where they could,
usually out of Christianity’s reach. It was not always nice for them, but present-day
Spain was the safest place in Europe for Jews during those early anti-Semitic
massacres. Under Moorish rule, Jews often flourished. The Reconquest of the
Iberian Peninsula took place over several centuries. Jews who lived under Moorish
rule for centuries suddenly found themselves the new subjects of Christian rulers.
As one more Moorish city-state fell to the Christian armies, Moors and Jews fled
to another Moorish city-state, or tried fitting in under the new regime. With
the degeneration of Moorish rule in Spain, sometimes Jews felt they had a better
deal with the new Christian overlords, and sometimes they did…for awhile.

Dominican
priest Vincente Ferrer preached many hysterical anti-Semitic diatribes in the
late 1300s in Seville, leading to riots and mass murders of Jews in 1391. The
slaughters spread out and dotted the Iberian Peninsula. One option of Jews finding
themselves under Christian rule was converting to Christianity to stay alive.
It amounted to conversion by the sword. Previously, the Jews often chose the
sword, but in 1391 something broke in them, and many chose conversion. Those
"New Christians" were called conversos or marranos, marranos
being derived from the Spanish word for swine.

A
significant motivation for the mass murders of Jews that peppered Europe was greed.
When Jews were murdered, their property was taken. Many of those inciting the
massacres got rich from Jewish plunder.

After
"conversion," many Jews strove to hide their Jewish heritage. For Christians,
conversion still did not take Jews off the hook. The persecution became racial
rather than religious. Jews were white people too, and it was not easy to distinguish
them from other Europeans, especially in Spain. When the racial strategy proved
unworkable, the strategy then became ferreting out New Christians who secretly
practiced their Jewish faith. Throughout the 1400s, Jews in Spain were oppressed,
with riots and massacres. Being a converso was no guarantee of safety,
and some riots were specifically directed toward conversos. It escalated
throughout the century, the Christian armies kept gaining ground, and Moors were
pushed to the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula. The last remaining Moorish
city-state was Granada.

In
1474, Ferdinand and Isabella ascended the throne, and idea of Spain grew
from their rule. The peninsula was under one rule during the Roman days, but
that was a thousand years previously. In 1480 Isabella began the Spanish Inquisition,
and life got much worse for Jews. The Inquisition specifically targeted conversos
who secretly practiced their Jewish faith. Many Jews did keep their faith
in secret, which was understandable. The Inquisition's job was hunting down those
"traitors." The Inquisition's fires then began burning across the Iberian
Peninsula, consuming Jews by the thousand.

Jews
were not Europe's only oppressed group. As the Spanish Inquisition heated up,
witches were burning from one end of Western Europe to the other. The Inquisition
had a hand in the witch-hunts, and could feign clean hands. The Church never
officially burned a heretic. They would condemn them and "relax" them
to secular authorities for their punishment. Similarly, the Church wrote the
handbooks for finding and dealing with witches, and their treatment of heretics
was adopted to various degrees in the witch-hunts. While the Inquisition did
not play in England, burning witches did. England had expelled its Jews centuries
earlier, as had France, so Jew-hunting was not a sport for them. About 85% of
the witches executed were women, and many were healers of some kind. The witch-hunts
were a women's Holocaust. There were instances where villages committed effective
suicide by killing all of its women.

In
1492, Granada fell to the Christian armies, ending several centuries of Moorish
rule on the Iberian Peninsula. When the Spanish armies controlled everything
on the Iberian Peninsula except for Portugal, the Spanish sovereigns issued a
new decree: Jews faced the choice of either conversion or expulsion. The numbers
for Spain's Jews were 160,000 expelled, 50,000 converts and 20,000 deaths.[59]
Some estimates go much higher, with 400,000 Jews leaving Spain. During
the 1400s, Jews were expelled throughout Europe: Vienna, 1421; Cologne, 1424;
Bavaria, 1442 and 1450; Milan 1489; Florence and Tuscany, 1494, and many other
places. Although Poland had anti-Jew riots in 1348-49 (Black Death) and 1407
and 1494, by 1500 Poland was considered the safest place in Europe for Jews.
Most Jews expelled from Spain went to the Ottoman Empire, where the Islamic culture
welcomed them. About 10,000 went to Italy, but Spain
invaded Italy during the 1500s, and those Jews again ended up in the wrong
place.

When Jews were expelled, ending
up in a region already filled with Jewish refugees, that would often trigger expulsions
in that region also. The Wandering Jew became a part of the folklore about that
time. In 1517, Martin Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation with his Ninety-five
Theses. In the long run, it probably helped Jews by dividing Christians. However,
the early protestant theologians were not kindly disposed to Jews, Martin Luther
perhaps the worst of them, with his 1543 pamphlet "On the Jews and their
Lies." His diatribe is seen as a stepping-stone to the Jewish Holocaust.

Virtually all of Western Europe was hostile
to Jews, and those who did not flee to Islamic lands went to Poland. During the
1500s, the Jews thrived in Poland and nowhere else in Europe, except for some
in Southern Italy. In 1541 in Venice, the first European ghetto was formed.
The Jews had lived in segregated living before in Europe and in Islamic lands,
but the Venetian ghetto was a kind of Jewish prison. Some historians have questioned
why the Jews accepted their fate in Venice, while others feel it was understandable,
after all the demoralizing events during the previous centuries, climaxing with
the mass murders and expulsions from Spain, and further expulsions and murders
when the Spaniards conquered Northern Italy. There was a certain passivity and
acceptance of their condition. It was partly due to their religious convictions.
It was also an attitude remarked upon as they were being herded to their deaths
in World War II.

Wealth, Jews and the Age of Colonialism

In 1493, the New World's
rape began with Columbus’ second voyage. Although the Crown had
specific laws forbidding Jews from sullying the New World with their presence,
it is estimated that of the 200,000 European residents in Mexico by 1570, a third
were converted Jews and another third were converted Moors.[60]
That was a logical place for them to flee, but the Inquisition was not far behind,
hunting for crypto-Jews and Moors. More Jews fled to the Islamic world. Poland
was the last Jewish haven in Europe. Charles V
was the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain when Cortés was conquering the Aztecs, while Martin Luther was making
protestant noise. Charles V was a Hapsburg and inherited a vast realm, and the
Conquistadors were securing a much vaster one. Through the political and royal
machinations of Europe, Charles ended up with the Netherlands as part of his realm.
The Netherlands was full of merchants and tradesmen, and was prosperous.

Charles issued the edict condemning Martin
Luther's work, which Luther defended at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Charles did
not stop the Reformation from happening. The Reformation and Counter Reformation
were very bloody affairs, with wars that lasted for generations. Charles was
Europe's most powerful ruler in 1519, when he bribed his way into becoming the
Holy Roman Emperor as well as being Spain’s king. In 1520, he became the King
of Germany. Just as the first magnificent treasures arrived
from Mesoamerica, giving a hint of things to come, Charles was reaching his
power’s peak. Charles' hegemony was short-lived. Wars, politics and the Reformation
assailed his empires, and when he stepped down in 1558, all he gave his son was
Spain and the Netherlands.

The Reformation found fertile soil among the educated mercantile
class of the Netherlands. Charles tried stamping it out by bringing the Inquisition
there in 1522. For more than forty years the Inquisition had raged in Spain,
consigning thousands of Jews to the flames while keeping the rest terrified.
Since they were mere Jews being burned alive, most of Europe did not get excited
about it. When The Inquisition came to the Netherlands however, putting real
Europeans to the question, that was going too far. That was when anti-Inquisition
polemics really began in Europe. That was when the Inquisition's popular image
was formed, that antihuman organ of terror and oppression. It had always been
that, but it was not until Protestants began being burned alive that Europeans
got angry. The Spanish and Dutch Inquisitions were more nationalistic than religious,
not really backed by Rome.

The Reformation
woke up Rome, and they revived the Inquisition in 1542, and for the first time
made a central governing office to run it, called the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
Before that, the inquisitors operated without a central office coordinating their
activities. The Holy Office was initially relatively tame, and largely confined
to Italy for a dozen years. The Inquisition became more ambitious in 1555, with
Pope Paul IV recommending hunting down heretical bishops and cardinals. In 1559,
the Index of Forbidden Books was first published, winning the Catholic
Church further infamy.

In 1566, the Dutch began rioting against the oppressive sway of
the Catholic Church and Spain. That began a war that did not finally end until
1648. The Spanish war against the Netherlands was a major factor in bankrupting the Spanish Crown several times by the
1650s, and helped set the stage for Spain's decline. For opportunistic reasons,
England began helping the Netherlands in 1585, and in 1588 prevailed over the
Spanish Armada. By 1600, the Netherlands was free of Spanish domination. Jews flocked to
Western Europe’s only haven, and in 1615 were legally allowed to stay if the province
would have them.

Also,
Jews migrated to nearby Hamburg, on the periphery of the Holy Roman Empire. When
the Thirty Years War broke out in 1618, Jewish financiers helped the Hapsburgs.
The Thirty Years War was Europe’s most brutal war to that time. Europeans had
demonstrated for many years in the New World and elsewhere that they were masters
of earthly violence, and honor and rules made no difference. The goal was winning
at all costs by any means. The Thirty Years War gave new meaning to war. The
concept of total war, of killing the enemy at all costs and surviving to fight
the next day, put down deep roots during a war that lasted thirty years and killed
four million people, half of them civilians, most of them Germanic people. Jews
were experts on resourcefulness, surviving on practically nothing, and that resourcefulness
came in handy in fighting that war, and Christians put aside their enmity toward
Jews if they could provide the resources to fight and survive. Their ascendant
role as financiers, managers and procurers of resources also won them enemies,
and there were still Jew slaughters and other abuses, but they became an integral
part of the region's economy.

The Dutch
began their imperial expansion in about 1600, sailing the high seas and making the Spanish pay whenever they could. The
Dutch were the first great mercantile colonial power. The Dutch Republic
of the United Provinceswas Europe’s first republic, and the heart
of European liberalism. That did not mean that they were gentle colonizers.
French pirates had been attacking Spanish ships since they first began coming
home with New World plunder. England got into the game in the late 1500s, and
the Dutch joined them in the early 1600s. That
began the European scramble for the world. Whether it
was in Asia, the New World, Africa or the South Pacific, the English, Dutch, French,
Spanish, Portuguese, Swedes, Danes, Russians and others fought over who would
loot the world. Some came to the game later than others. Germany and Japan were
the two biggest latecomers, and when they found few foreign lands and people that
they could call their own, humanity experienced two colossal wars.

The first two centuries of Europe’s New World hegemony was the
most wasteful plunder of all time. Killing off nearly all the natives of a hemisphere
was bad enough, but what did Europe gain from it? Europe supposedly gained wealth
through its colonial exploitation. That was the reason they did it. The benefits
that Europe derived from the first two centuries of the New World's plunder, a
plunder paid for with the lives of perhaps 70 million natives, were: gold, silver,
sugar, tobacco, dyes and furs.

Adam
Smith's The Wealth of Nations is considered the first major economic treatise
ever written, and was published in 1776, long after the initial plunder was over.
Smith wrote that a gold rush was one of humankind's
stupidest events. Gold and silver are not wealth, and particularly back then.
About the only intrinsic value that gold and silver had was ornamental. Making
silver eating utensils was the only practical use of the metal until modern times,
when it began being used in industry. Gold had even less practical use than silver.
The only reason gold and silver were perceived as valuable was their use as money.
Anything can be used as currency, because currency is only representative of wealth,
not wealth itself. The only thing that made scarce metals valuable was their
scarcity.

Spain’s
colonial experience is a perfect example of the uselessness of mining gold.
There was a transfer of wealth that occurred when Spain brought back that gold
and silver, bought with the lives of tens of millions of natives. Some Spaniards
got their hands on the goods of other European nations, as they honored the "precious
metal" as a form of payment. Spain’s elites lived relatively lavishly for
a short while, although Spain as a whole declined,
and it was arguably worse off in 1600 than it was in 1500.

There
is little intrinsic value in any currency. Native Americans sometimes did similar
things in their ignorance. Wampum belts were considered wealth in some societies,
but making them was a waste of time. The less time and effort spent creating
currency, the better off the society is. The Aztecs were a little better. They
used chocolate beans for currency. They could make a drink out of the chocolate
beans, so there was intrinsic value in the currency. Ears of corn would have
been the ideal currency in Mexico, and it was. The Aztecs largely had a barter
economy, and something as easily handled and relatively small in value as corn
(per ear), became an ideal unit of exchange. People could eat the money, which
is the ideal currency. In a barter economy gold is virtually worthless, and was
one reason the natives could not understand the Spanish obsession with gold.

Money is only the scorekeeper,
not the game. When the rigging the scoreboard becomes the game, the system is
broken. All gold rushes reflected the ignorance of the societies engaging in
them. They ultimately impoverished the societies that had them, as the net result
was wasting the effort of one segment of the population (the miners, refiners,
etc) so they could steal from the other. The only way Spaniards were able to
avoid an even worse economic collapse was enslaving
natives to do the work. They first stole the results of millennia of native
effort in creating their gold artifacts. The Spaniards melted that all down,
destroying all the artistic value. Then they enslaved the natives as millions
of them died in the mining operations. If the Spaniards had to dig the gold,
the 16th century gold rush would not have happened. Millions of natives
paid with their lives so Spain could leech off its neighbors for a brief time.

The other main product the Spaniards received
from the New World was dyes. Again, what was the intrinsic value? Virtually
none. Dyes are sheerly cosmetic, providing no real wealth. Enslaved natives
killed small insects for their bodily juices that made the red dyes. Thousands
of insects would be killed to produce an ounce of that dye. Again, it was a prodigious
waste, but if there were natives to enslave and insects to kill, they could give
their lives to producing Spanish baubles. The materialism of that age echoes
to the present day, with the rampant consumerism that plagues America and is infecting
the world. More than 90% of the export “value” from the New World was gold and
silver in that first century of "discovery."

What
was the other great boon from those early colonial days? Sugar. The Portuguese
specialized in that more than the Spaniards, especially when their plunder of
Brazil did not find any El Doradoes. The Portuguese
specialized in producing sugar. What good is
sugar? There has rarely been a substance more damaging to human health than refined
sugar. All one can say for refined sugar is that it tastes good, while greatly
contributing to diabetes, tooth decay and obesity. Refined sugar is more
of a drug than anything else, and provided less than zero benefit for Europe's
health.

Who did the Portuguese recruit
to raise that sugar? When they first began raising sugar in Brazil, they enslaved
the natives to work on their plantations. The natives died off in about a generation,
just as they did in the Caribbean, under the slave conditions the Portuguese subjected
them to. As with the Spanish gold mines, silver mines and plantations, the Brazilian
natives were considered expendable assets. When the natives were exterminated,
the Portuguese began importing African slaves. The sugar trade brought more African slaves to the New World than
anything else. The natives were all killed off, and tens of millions of Africans
lost their lives to ensure that Europe was well stocked with a drug that ruined
their health, but tasted good. Today the sugar industry devastates Northeastern
Brazil, with about thirty million people enslaved to the sugar system. Growing
sugar is also devastating to the soils where it is raised.[61] The only place
in the sugar empire that has tried beaking the sugar-growing habit is Cuba.

When England, France and the Netherlands came
to the Empire Game in the 1600s, what were the benefits of their colonialism?
The first thing they always looked for was gold. Francis Drake became England's richest private citizen
by his surprise plundering of the Spanish Empire's Pacific ports, filling his
ship with silver bought with countless native lives. The first Englishman who
looked for gold instead of stealing it was Martin
Frobisher, who hauled hundreds of tons of fool’s gold to England. Walter
Raleigh was after gold too, a quest which cost him his life.

When
the English established their first military beachhead in the New World at Jamestown,
the natives kept them alive with their corn and other food, which was the typical
situation with all European invasions. If not for native food and help, the Europeans
would have always died. The first thing the Jamestown invaders did was look for
gold. As with Frobisher and Raleigh, they did not find any. Something had to
economically justify the invasion, and it was discovered, for another great "benefit"
to Europe: tobacco. Tobacco was the primary export from Jamestown and the region
throughout the 1600s. As the Portuguese did in Brazil, the English imported captured
Africans to get the work done. Tobacco brought Africans to America, to grow another
addictive substance that ruined European health.

Only one product came to Europe in those early
colonial days that had any genuine value: fur. Fur
was used as clothing to conserve body heat. Humans are naked, and have stolen
the fur from animals ever since they migrated from their natural range in the
tropics. In all the New World's plunder during those first two centuries, it
was the only item of any intrinsic value. All the others had illusionary value,
and in the case of gold, silver, sugar and tobacco, they ultimately damaged European
society. For that, a hemisphere was depopulated and another continent's population
(Africa) was devastated. When the French joined the game in North America, it
sought the fur trade, and its early “help” completely extinguished the Huron tribe.

When the United States got into the act, trappers
soon followed the Lewis and Clark expedition,
completing the extermination of nearly all fur-bearing animals in the Northern
Hemisphere. That fur "business" was engaged in by some of most ruthless
and primitive humans of all time.[62] As with most interactions between
indigenous and European cultures, the result of the fur trade was virtually an
unmitigated disaster for the natives. The fur trade spread drunkenness, disease
and viciousness throughout the western lands, and early robber baron capitalists
such as John Jacob Astor became rich from the process that ultimately swindled
the natives out of their lands and lives.

Although
the fur business was the only one that created some actual "wealth"
for Europe, it was short-lived wealth, as the animals that provided the fur were
driven to extinction. Beaver-skin hats were the rage, which drove the beaver
to extinction in most of the United States. Bison robes were another short-lived
fashion item, which was a native "industry," while the natives and bison
lasted. “Wealth-producing" activity that is really a short-lived plunder
is not really wealth producing, something that Carl
Sauer remarked on. It is stealing wealth from future generations, and over
time is a net reduction of wealth. The issue of creating or husbanding sustainable
resources was completely alien to European thought. It is not being practiced
to any degree of significance even today. Throughout the long centuries of the
New World's rape, there were few observations that plundering resources like there
was no tomorrow, would guarantee that there was no tomorrow. Ironically,
one of the few to observe it was the first on the scene. Columbus, himself the
architect of the hand-severing gold tribute system, said that the reckless squandering
of native life by the Spaniards on Española would be detrimental in the end, because
dead slaves cannot perform any work. For the next four centuries, his voice
was one of the few in the wilderness.

How
much "benefit" did Europe receive from all that New World booty? Europeans
had their teeth rot and developed diseases from the sugar, but it tasted good.
They enjoyed tobacco; dying of the diseases it gave them. They had their economies
harmed and in some cases destroyed by relying on the influx of gold and silver,
thinking it was wealth. They wore fashionable and useful fur, while the fur-bearing
animals lasted. They had natives make dyes that made fabric different colors.
That was about it.

There was also another
industry, although relatively minor as far as an export business: the forest "products"
business. The forests were chopped down with abandon, especially in North America.
The eastern United States was deforested as the white man's "civilization"
progressed across the continent. The New World tropics have been gradually deforested,
largely to produce export crops such as sugar, bananas, beef, coffee, and the
trees also became an export crop as they were chopped down. A few rich landowners
(mainly large corporations today) got the benefits, the people who did the work
became virtual slaves to the system, the environments were devastated, and the
white people enjoyed import crops such as sugar, bananas, coffee, cocaine, etc.
The disaster continues today. Bringing the white man's ways was a disaster for
the natives, but the white man benefited, somewhat.[63]

For those who came to the New World in those
early days, they had other benefits that did not accrue directly to Europe. The
Spanish soldiers got the dream of a lifetime as they raped every native woman
they could. If it was not rape, they had harems of as many as eighty women for
one man. They enjoyed the benefits of native slaves and concubines, while they
lasted. The sexual relations between the Spanish soldiers and natives were virtually
never romantic love. They were not relations of equality. The Spanish soldiers
were exercising the conqueror’s prerogative. They set themselves up as lords
on the native backs. The English "settlers" stole the land from the
natives, something that their American descendants
excelled at. They killed off countless bison, passenger pigeons
and fur-bearing animals while they lasted. They deforested many millions of acres
in the name of "progress." Stealing native land, and enslaving and
raping the natives were the "benefits" to the settlers. In addition,
more than ten million Africans "migrated" to the New World in chains,
while perhaps more than thirty million Africans
did not survive the process.

Europe
had so many wars that they had names such the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years'
War, the Ten Years' War, the Seven Years' War, and the Seven Weeks' War. Other
wars were named the Wars of the Roses (an English civil war which lasted 30 years,
right on the heels of England’s Hundred Years' War with France), King William's
War, Queen Anne's War, King George's War, the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Carnatic
Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, The War of Austrian Succession,
the War of Spanish Succession, the War of Polish Succession, the War of Bavarian
Succession, the War of the Devolution, the Wars of Religion, the War of the Grand
Alliance, and the Napoleonic Wars. There were five major Crusades mounted by
the Catholic Church, with numerous smaller Crusades, and the Albigensian
Crusade. Later, Crusades became something that secular leaders could mount.
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II led a Crusade, only to have the Pope declare a
Crusade on Frederick. Later, King Louis IX of France mounted two Crusades.

Most of the bloodshed occurred in wars fought
between the European powers on European soil. The Thirty Years' War and the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars killed about nine million people in total, and
nearly half were civilian casualties.[64] Others on that
list were fought abroad, as the powers vied for the right to pillage the world,
as with the French and Indian Wars, which included the wars of William, George
and Anne. Then their imperial descendants fought their own wars, as with the
Boer War. The European powers also had internal wars, such as the French Revolution,
the English Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Revolutions of 1848 (numerous
nations). Their colonies had wars to break free from the mother countries, as
with the Mexican Revolution, the American Revolution, the Haitian
Revolution, the many Latin American revolutions,
and in the postwar years of the 20th century, there were revolutions
throughout the colonized world.

Finally,
of course, there were two World Wars to top it off, followed by a forty year Cold
War, and we may be heading for our third World War, one we may not survive. The
current “war on terror” looks a lot like World War III’s beginning.
Some have called this period of global European domination the 500-year Reich.
If humanity survives the coming transition, historians may look back to the white
man's millennium of 1000 to 2000 AD and call it "The Thousand Year War."
There were far more than 100 million war deaths in the 20th century,
by far history’s most violent century. The 19th century is a distant
second at about 20 million deaths.[65]
About 90% was initiated or performed by white men, nearly all of them Christians.

While
some Jews enjoyed their lives in the Netherlands, and resettled in the New World
and elsewhere, the great magnet of Poland drew the world's largest concentration
of Jews. It did not last forever, however.

In
1648, the Thirty Years' War was ending, and Poland was feeling the strain of thirty
years of war. Then the peasants were led to an uprising that targeted Jews.
As usual, a power-hungry aristocrat manipulated the peasants to kill Jews, which
led to tens of thousands of Jewish deaths, performed by peasants and Cossacks.
That time the Jews could be "blamed" for their fate. The Jews had become
prosperous middlemen and financiers, and managed a system that exploited the peasants.
The peasants took it out on Jews, aggravated by elite manipulation. Many Jews
fled west, and the English let some in, the first time in more than 350 years.
They also fled to the Netherlands, Germany and near Strasbourg, part of present
day France and part of the Holy Roman Empire then, the same empire that slaughtered
the Jews around 1300 in numerous massacres, driving them to Poland in the first
place.

When the Crusading armies took that detour in 1096 and
massacred several thousand Jews on the way the Holy Land, one observation was
that those who committed the slaughter were not trained soldiers, but more like
rabble, and they could not be controlled or kept from their actions. The slaughter
was engaged in by Europe's lower classes, who found a way to vent their frustration
on their hierarchical competitors.

Jews
were usually slaughtered by mobs. However, the elite created the intellectual
framework that justified the murders. Thomas Aquinas wrote the influential works
that further set the stage for the Inquisition. Other high-ranking Catholic officials
wrote and published various treatises. The official manual for witch hunting
was the Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1488. Pope Innocent VIII wrote
the work’s preface, giving it papal approval. The framework for witch-hunting
was developed by elites, but common people carried out the oppression. Most of
the "witches" who died in those years were poor, although as there was
money in it from confiscating the accused’s property, the accusation began targeting
people of higher economic status. Their accusers were also poor.

The
"investigations" and sentences were carried out by officialdom, but
the executions of witches, heretics and conversos were often attended by
mobs of average folks, in an often-festive atmosphere. People would come from
miles around to watch the executions. In America, when they had public executions,
even public lynchings, and the people came from miles
around, sometimes undertaking great journeys to witness the executions. Why?
Usually those being executed came from the same social strata as those watching
them. Witches, heretics and Jews were not dying for anything that anybody would
call a crime today. Those who eagerly watched the executions bore significant
responsibility for those people's deaths. The elites who invented and ran the
system also bore responsibility.

If
I had joined the Air Force Academy and become a pilot, I may
have dropped bombs onto Iraq, wiping out one of their water treatment facilities,
which America specifically targeted during the Gulf War. Wiping out one of those water treatment
facilities led to the deaths of thousands of children. If I had done that, how
responsible would I have been for the deaths of those children? How responsible
would my father have been for those deaths, influencing me into believing that
being a soldier was what turned me into a man? How responsible would the person
have been who fueled my plane? How about the one who loaded my bombs? How about
my commanding officer? How about George Bush? How about the crew who built my
plane at the defense contractor's factory in America? How about Saddam Hussein?
How about Winston Churchill, who was an integral
part of Britain's colonial exploitation of that region many years ago, setting
in motion dynamics that are still playing out? How about the media reporters
and others who played a part in the disinformation campaign
by the United States government, uncritically repeating the story of the Iraqi
incubator incident and George Bush lying about Iraq's intentions for Saudi
Arabia? The media should have known better, given the government's record
of lying to the public, especially regarding matters of warfare. How about all
those mothers and housewives around America who tied yellow ribbons around trees,
waved flags and screamed, "Support our troops!"? How about the 90%
of American citizens who approved of what we did to Iraq? How about me, filling
my gas tank with cheap gasoline, partly bought with the deaths of those Iraqi
children?

A lawyer's response to that
list might be interesting. Human beings do not have the capacity to rationally
assess "responsibility" for those participants I just mentioned. Does
that mean they are not responsible? The person buying cheap gasoline is not as
responsible as George Bush was when he lied to the public about Iraq's intentions
regarding Saudi Arabia, stonewalled Iraq's attempts
to negotiate a withdrawal, and authorized an attack that amounted to biological
warfare, initiating a series of events that has taken more than a million lives
in Iraq so far. The person buying that cheap gasoline still has some responsibility.
The public cheering the post-war parades has some responsibility for it.
In order for the system to work as it does, it needs willing participants. Just
as the cancer racket needs lemmings marching
into the oncology wards, if the American public did not cheer and march to war,
there would be no war.

The masses bear
some responsibility, and arguably nearly all of it. Part of my motivation
for pursuing free energy with Dennis Lee was
eliminating the industrialized world's dependence on Middle East oil. I foresaw
what is happening in Iraq today, and far worse (which may yet come to pass), when
I was a teenager. I have devoted my adult life to preventing what is happening
in the Middle East today. If there is any American not responsible for
what is going on Iraq today, I must contend for the honor; yet, nearly every time
I put gasoline my car, I think about those dying Iraqi children. I think about
the bloodshed in Nigeria, East
Timor and elsewhere so the oil companies can keep pumping that cheap oil,
and we can have cheap gasoline. I know that I bear some responsibility
what is happening in Iraq today.

The
net can be cast much wider than America. All of those so-called diplomats at
the United Nations, supposedly representing the people of their nations, nearly
all knuckled under to United States and British pressure. If the diplomats at
the United Nations had any spine, there likely would never have been a Gulf War,
Iraq would have negotiated a withdrawal, and all those Iraqis would not have died.
How about the people in those nations, whose representatives acted so cowardly?
People can talk about elites all day long, and how they do not really represent
the people of their nation. It is a Political Science 101 concept that every
government, to some degree, needs the consent of the governed in order to exist.
Using that perspective, one it is difficult to deny, every person on earth bears
some responsibility for what is happening in Iraq today.

Being
responsible does not mean feeling guilty, not guilt in the way the West defines
it. The root of the word responsible means being able to respond. My goal with
making the case for our responsibility is getting across the idea that we can
all do something about it. Some are in better positions to act than others.
It is within each of us to decide what we will do. Just not cheering
the violence would be a big step for most Americans. What goes around comes
around. Those who today rationalize the death and destruction in Iraq as a noble
undertaking, or heap all the responsibility onto Saddam Hussein's shoulders, will
one day, usually in another lifetime, have the roles reversed, suffering and dying
while others look on, rationalizing their fate while benefiting from it. Then
they may realize that killing, exploitation and destruction are never "justified."

This
topic will end with what Noam Chomsky has said on this issue, from a "rational"
perspective. Chomsky says that in the area of warfare, for instance, those in
society that look at the violence and atrocities with clinical detachment, equanimity
and apathy bear a great burden of responsibility for Hitler and others like him
coming into power. Hitler could not appear on the scene if it were not for the
complacent acquiescence and complicity of the masses.[66]
It is easy to blame the Hitlers and Husseins of the world, and much more difficult
to stop shuffling along with the herd, helping to create the herd that is so easily
manipulated.

Jews participated in Europe's
rape of the world. Jewish financiers helped fund New World expeditions, they
owned many of the ships used in the slave trade, and were part of the money economy
that craved gold and silver. They were largely forced into those positions, but
they could have migrated to the Islamic world and been treated better than Europe
did, but for a number of reasons, such as increased economic opportunity, the
Jews stayed in Europe, although the Middle East was more their "natural"
home.

The Modern Age and Jews

There are various lines of demarcation used to separate one period of history
from another, all being artificial to a degree. The waning of Church power was
critical to Europe's evolution. The Thirty Years' War was a war of the Counter
Reformation, waged by the Catholic Church to bring Protestants back into the fold.

The Thirty Years' War marked the end of Catholic
military attempts to regain its religious hegemony in Europe. The influence of
Catholic dogma eroded. Luther initiated a movement that did not go away. Killing
up to a million people in France to wipe out Catharism kept
the Catholic Empire together awhile longer. In the late 1300s and early 1400s,
there was the spectacle of the Great Schism, as various "popes" vied
for the throne. At one point three people declared themselves the one, true Pope.
It did not inspire the flock to watch such power struggles among "holy"
men.

Luther's revolution would not
be stopped, no matter how many millions of people were slaughtered by the Catholic
armies. By 1650, Northern Europe had become Protestant and would never reenter
the Catholic fold. Dogma was eroding in other ways. In 1543, a devout and powerful
Polish Catholic who was strongly opposed to Luther's work, Nicolaus Copernicus, had a book published on
his deathbed. Publishing it while he was dying turned out to be a smart move.
In 1514, Copernicus was invited by the Lateran Council to help reform the calendar
that had become quite inaccurate. That led him to observing the sun and moon,
which led him to propose a radical theory: the earth orbited the sun.

It is impossible to say exactly what Copernicus
thought, but it appears that he was not worried about the Church's reaction to
his work.[67] He
should have been. For the next sixty years, few embraced his work. In 1600,
Dominican monk Giordano Bruno was burned alive in Rome for his heresies, one of
the most significant being his belief that the universe was infinitely boundless
and the earth revolved around the sun. Bruno was not really a scientist as the
term is defined today, but more of a mystic (although the world’s greatest scientists
were all mystics), but his execution would put
the work of a seminal scientist at risk not long afterward.

In 1609-1610, a devout Italian Catholic was making and using
a new instrument: the telescope. In January of 1610, Galileo Galilei saw the
moons of Jupiter through his homemade telescope, and observed that not everything
in the cosmos revolves around the earth. He announced his findings, which soon
had him examined by the Inquisition. During the next generation, Galileo had
conflicts with Church authorities, and in 1633 was brought to his knees, forced
to recant his statements. The earth was the center of the universe because the
Church said so. Galileo was not executed, but spent the rest of his life under
house arrest. Yet, he resolutely held to his conviction that observation was
more important than merely referring to something an ancient scholar wrote about
the nature of reality. If Galileo could see with his own eyes that moons orbited
Jupiter, then they did, and the Church's decrees could do nothing to change it.

The work and ordeal of Galileo is seen as the
beginning of the age of science in Europe. His treatment at the hands of the
Church terrified other men of reason, and Rene Descartes, a French contemporary
of Galileo's, was decidedly intimidated by Galileo's treatment, backing off from
Copernican philosophy when it was pronounced heretical by the Church. Science
and observation eventually prevailed, but not without a cost. Joseph Schwartz
makes the case in The Creative Moment that Galileo, and later Newton, couched
their work in mathematics to make it less susceptible to the Church's attacks.
Schwartz argued that those strategic decisions sent science awry, making it rely
on mathematics too much, making it more occult than it needed to be. I have never
run into a scientific theory that could not largely be explained without mathematics.
Math is useful, but many textbooks and other presentations of scientific theories
that get so deeply into mathematical minutia that the basic theories themselves
get lost under the microscope. Math has been used to make science less
accessible to the masses, and even ends up confounding scientists at times, and
that is a tragedy.

Galileo, Descartes
and Newton were major figures in liberating thought from religious dogma, although
all were devoutly religious. The scientific revolution that was beginning, along
with the failed Counter Reformation, along with the scramble for the earth by
the European powers, eventually made life better for Jews. Jews were not without
their own intellectual intolerance, and the probably greatest Jewish philosopher
of all time, Dutch citizen Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), was excommunicated by the
Synagogue for his rationalist philosophy.

After
the Polish massacres in 1650, for the next 150 years, Jewish life in Christian
Europe was better than it had ever been. Although many Jews fled Poland, it still
had Europe's largest Jewish population. During those years, Jews slowly migrated
to the New World, to parts of Western Europe, and they were not being slaughtered.

During the 1700s, and gaining steam after 1750,
a movement began in France called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a
movement that stressed the power of reason and the common bonds of humanity.
It was the maturation of the work of people such as Descartes and Spinoza. Its
goal was replacing dogma with reason. It took the Protestant Revolution a step
further, and largely abandoned religion. It was a heady time in Europe. As with
all movements, its promise was much greater than its realized potential.

The Renaissance was a movement that spread
throughout Europe between the 1400s and 1600s. Some the greatest art humanity
has yet produced came from that period. Social advances were still limited, although
the Renaissance was related to the Reformation. Artists were largely subservient
to a system of royal patronage, and their artistic themes were still largely religious.
While the Renaissance was flourishing and humanism developed in European thought,
Machiavelli and others were writing their treatises, and witches, books and heretics
burned across Europe, and the New World was being quickly
shorn of its native population. Nevertheless, one can see glimmers in Renaissance
thought that blossomed during the Enlightenment.

In
some ways, musical art reached its apex during the Enlightenment, with figures
such as Mozart, Beethoven and Hadyn producing masterpieces that may not be possible
today. Although the artists were still largely subservient to the royal patronage
system, sardonic paintings such as Goya's were being created. Art was becoming
more political. Revolutionary political writing became the backbone of the American
and French revolutions.

In
theory, the Enlightenment would make the lives of Jews better. Its promise was
greater than the reality. Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great was supposedly
a man of the Enlightenment, and he passed a law regarding Jews in 1750. The law
was a mixed blessing, which distinguished between "ordinary" and "extraordinary"
Jews, and enacted some oppressive economic measures, but the Enlightenment did
improve the lives of European Jews. In 1773, the King of Sweden allowed Jews
to migrate there, and in 1782, the Austrian Emperor issued an edict of tolerance
for the Jews. However, where the Enlightenment really helped Jews was across
the ocean, in the British colonies of North America. There were about a thousand
Jews in the colonies, a number that would grow greatly. The Enlightenment began
in France, and was probably partly inspired by the Native Americans’ egalitarian
societies, which many Frenchmen had profound respect for. One endemic problem
of settling the Americas was the settlers running off and "going
native." European settlers often saw the native way of life as superior
to European ways, and ran off to join the Indian tribes. The converse, Indians
running to join the white man's "civilization," almost
never occurred.[68]

Enlightenment
ideals became influential, and men such as Thomas
Jefferson were children of the Enlightenment. Again, that is relative. Jefferson
was a slave owner. George Washington was
a slave-owning aristocrat who married into more money, and made it big in land
speculation, stealing native land. There is significant evidence that the United
States modeled its constitution after the Iroquois
Confederacy, which had the world's only functioning democracy at that time,
something that profoundly influenced Ben Franklin.

The Enlightenment was influential, and one
tenet was religious toleration, something nearly impossible to find during Europe's
previous 1500 years. Much Enlightenment theorizing on religion was a breath of
fresh air that could not have been published earlier. Unfortunately, in rejecting
religion, they also ultimately rejected spirituality, although many were "deists." In
ways, the Enlightenment helped pave the way for the crass materialism that is
seen today in organized science, economic
theory and other areas of Western thought.

Nevertheless,
America's Founding Fathers embraced religious
tolerance, although they were in many ways as racist, bigoted, violent, greedy
and elitist as could be expected of European descendents. The "Great Experiment"
of the United States proved quite beneficial for European Jews. Jews were sometimes
prominent supporters of the American Revolution. When the Constitution was finally
ratified, it specifically stated that there would be no state religion. Fundamentalist
Christian beliefs aside, America has never officially been a Christian nation.
In the West, a secular nation was a big improvement over Europe's past 1500 years.
Still, nearly all Americans were Christians, and while they could not quite shake
their heritage of religious bigotry, Jews were treated better in America than
in any European country. In the West, America became the Jews' best friend.

While the U.S. Constitution was being ratified,
another revolution influenced by the Enlightenment happened on European soil.
The Enlightenment began in France, and the French Revolution was supposed to be
a movement of the common man, seeking equality for all. The Jews had great hopes
for the French Revolution. In 1784, King Louis XVI
abolished the head tax on the Jews of Alsace, and the Bastille was stormed in
1789. In 1791, Jews were officially emancipated in France. It was not a complete
emancipation. The decree was only issued after intense political battles, and
part of the decree put the government in charge of collecting debts owed to Jews
in eastern France. That addendum was not inserted for the Jews' benefit. Nevertheless,
Jews were officially free in Europe for the first time. Ghettos were torn down
wherever the French had influence.

Along
with the step taken forward, events were set in motion that would later haunt
the Jews. Voltaire was the leading Enlightenment philosopher, and his later works
attacked religion and attacked the Jews for their "superstitions," and
accused them of only being good at usury. The Jewish faith was largely what held
the Jewish people together. Not all Jews were happy with the anti-religious nature
of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and one Enlightenment outcome,
influenced by Voltaire's anti-Jewish writings, was the development of a secular
form of anti-Semitism.

In 1797, the Netherlands
and Venetian Republic also emancipated their Jews, under pressure from France.
Life began looking good for European Jews. The French Revolution became a bloodbath,
with the guillotine being invented and getting avid use. Then a new kind of dictator
grabbed power, crowned himself emperor, and Napoleon
initiated a series of wars that led to more European bloodbaths. The French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars killed about five million people, more than forty percent
of them civilians. Although Napoleon is a French national hero, many mystics
consider Napoleon the world’s first anti-Christ, Hitler the second, and the third
may be about to make his appearance.

There
are many conspiracy theories surrounding those days, with the founding of the
Illuminati, the machinations of the Jewish Rothschild family of financiers, the
Freemasons and the Founding Fathers, etc. While there are many secret
societies, and to a degree they do pull the world's strings, and maybe
a lot of them, they do not really have that much real power. They can pull the
strings because the Great Herd is so easily manipulated. If the herd woke up,
the games of manipulation would end.

While
Jews were freed in parts of Western Europe, events in Poland were less auspicious.
Russian imperialism was bumping up against Western Europe. Between 1772 and 1795,
Russia annexed and partitioned Poland, acquiring the world's largest Jewish community.
While Western Europe was being fitfully "enlightened" regarding Jews,
Russia was behind the times. The czars had little love for their new Jewish subjects,
and laws such as taking Jewish boys from their families at age twelve and turning
them into soldiers were little short of genocidal policies.

In Germany, the Enlightenment brought with it another trend
that led to the Holocaust. Much of today’s Germany was once part of the Holy
Roman Empire; the empire that tried reviving the Roman Empire’s glory days, wedded
to its state religion of Christianity. The Holy Roman Empire began in 800 AD,
when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor. Its ideal
of a union of church and state did not last that long, but the empire still existed
when Napoleon's armies invaded in 1806. Napoleon was socially progressive, in
a sense, by enacting social reforms such as guaranteed rights, freedom of religion,
centralizing the school systems, etc. They were not voluntary for the subject
states that he conquered, while installing his relatives on several thrones.
Germany was not as swept up into the Enlightenment as England and France were,
and when Napoleon rammed the Enlightenment down their throats, the Germans were
not happy with it. With the occupation of the Germanic region, Jews there were
given rights they never had before. While from the Jewish perspective it was
a positive development, the humiliating reign of Napoleon created a yearning in
German people for the good old days of imperial glory. They longed for the good
old days, and part of the good old days was Jews knowing their place.

Thus began a trend in anti-Semitism that waxed
and waned during the next century, culminating in the rise of Hitler. Jews became
German scapegoats. Part of the relative prosperity of their French and English
rivals was due to the fact that Germany came late to the global empire game.
The Prussian Empire was a northerly empire in the German regions, and they became
Europe’s most formidable army. Yet, they did not have vast imperial hinterlands
to plunder as England and France did. The industrialized world is "rich"
not because they are so smart, but because they enslaved the rest of the world
to attain their position today. That latecomer factor with Germany had a lot
to do with the world wars. The same went for Japan, imperial wannabes who came
to the game late, but England, France, Russia and the United States already controlled
most of the globe. Even the Spanish, Dutch and
Portuguese empires still had some life in them. Japan and Germany did not
have much they could call their own, from an imperial perspective, and they nurtured
their ambition over generations.

In
the meantime, the Industrial Revolution, partly
a product of the Enlightenment, was taking off. What is today call capitalism
was first named by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith in The Wealth
of Nations, published in 1776. In 1769, Scottish inventor James
Watt patented the modern steam engine, which powered the Industrial Revolution.
Capitalism and Industry created a new phenomenon in Europe. Great wealth was
theoretically being created in the factories that sprouted up across Europe.
It was not royalty getting rich, but a new class of people called capitalists.
It was a new form of exploitation. How beneficial capitalism has been for humanity
is doubtful, and the issue not yet resolved. One positive thing that capitalism
and industry did was help to make the institution of chattel slavery obsolete.
People did not need the muscle and sinew of black men when a machine could do
the job. The rich did not need to own people any more; they could rent them.
The defenders of slavery made the not-easily-rebutted argument that somebody takes
better care of something they own, than something they rent.

Ironically,
the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, which in turn inspired
the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The Haitian Revolution
was history's only successful slave rebellion, where a land of slaves freed themselves.
Although America was the "land of the free," it had nearly a million
African slaves when the revolution began, and what happened in Haiti was ominous
for the Founding Fathers, many of them slave
owners, such as Jefferson, Washington and Patrick Henry. Those Virginia planters
built their fortunes on the triple-evil of raising tobacco with slave labor on
stolen native land. Their worst nightmare would be for their slaves to stand
up in the tobacco fields, shaking their fists, shouting, "Give me liberty,
or give me death!" The United States was about the last nation to officially
recognize the Haitian Revolution, and did so largely due to the Civil War’s political exigencies.

By 1840, there were still only 15,000 Jews in America. They
did not have full citizen rights. They could not vote at first, and in Connecticut,
for instance, full citizenship was granted only to Christians. After
three decades of bitter political fighting, the "Jew Bill" was finally
passed in Maryland in 1826, giving Jews the right to vote, hold office and practice
law, but Jews still had restrictions on their rights. Although the First Amendment
of the Constitution forbade the recognition of religion, the states all passed
pro-Christian, and necessarily anti-Jewish, laws. The European heritage of America
could not be completely shaken, and anti-Semitism was an integral part of the
American experience.

Jews in America
were not slaughtered as they were in Europe. They did not have to wear Jew clothes.
The main reasons Jews got that treatment was because of American society's dynamics.
There were few Jews in America at the beginning, and Americans were obsessed with
slaughtering and dispossessing Native Americans
for most of the nineteenth century. There was also another group more feared
than Jews: African slaves. In Europe, they did not have to contend with a large
population of slaves of another race, nor a race they were exterminating to give
them "living space."

If the
United States were not so intent on clearing the continent of its natives and
keeping its slaves in chains, the Jewish American experience may have been a starkly
different one. In the 1840s, the Industrial Revolution was rolling
along in Britain, complementing its colonial hegemony. America was also industrializing,
but was slower, partly because it was busy securing the North American continent.

By 1830, the movement that began with the humanists,
and was furthered by the Enlightenment, flowered in the liberal movements in Europe
between 1830 and 1880. Industrialization may have had something to do with the
slaves being freed, but factory workers were not much better off. While the capitalists
were getting rich, workers were severely exploited. It led to unionization movements
and other attempts to improve the workers’ lot. Those years were the era of Charles
Dickens’ writings. Along with the worker movement were political movements.
In the 1830s and 1840s there were revolutionary activities throughout Europe,
and along with the increasing freedoms won by workers and other commoners, Jews
were emancipated across Europe. In 1847, one of Jewry's greatest theorists envisioned
a classless system, and proposed a revolution to permanently end the exploitative
rule of the European oligarchy. Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto was a
call to arms for Europe’s oppressed.

Jewish
emancipation activities began with Belgium in 1830, and continued with Denmark
in 1848, Prussia in 1850, Norway in 1851, Sweden in 1865, Italy in 1870, Switzerland
in 1874, and Bulgaria in 1878, along with many other European nations. Not all
European nations became enlightened regarding Jews, however. Spain continued
four hundred years of anti-Semitic policies, and in 1914, Jews still had no rights
in Spain. That also went for Russia and Romania.

In
America, Jewish migration began flooding in. Between 1830 and 1865, the Jewish
population in America rose from 4500 to 150,000. Other European immigrants came,
as American immigration took off. Between 1830 and 1870 the American population
tripled, from 13 to 39 million. Between 1870 and 1900 it nearly doubled, from
39 to 76 million. Europe’s oppressed masses were flooding into America. The
United States population nearly doubled again from 1900 to 1950, from 76 to 150
million. It has nearly doubled again since 1950, to more than 270 million today.
In about 1850, the slave issue in America became heated, and American xenophobia
became an issue. Native Americans were virtually extinct east of the Mississippi River
by 1840, and Americans focused their neuroses onto the newcomers. Jews were not
the only oppressed group. Irish and German immigrants also felt the heat.

In Poland and Russia, Jews
were oppressed. Under Alexander II the Jewish situation improved somewhat, but
when he was assassinated in 1881, the Jewish Russian situation became grim. Jew
slaughters, called pogroms, became commonplace throughout the Russian Empire.
Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1882. There were more than five million Jews
in the Russian Empire in 1880. They fled with the initiation of the pogroms.
In 1881, Eastern European Jews were only 0.9% of annual immigration into America.
By 1887, it had risen to 6.5%.[69]
1.7 million Jews immigrated to America between 1890 and 1914. If there is anything
that I can view in American history with some pride, it is that it was a haven
for Europe's oppressed people, although at awesome cost to Native Americans and
their lands.

Jews were not exactly
welcomed to America. Beginning during the 1840s and 1850s, as American xenophobia
increased, anti-Semitism began rearing its head, and intensified during the Civil
War, with both the North and South blaming Jews for the Civil War's vagaries.
General Ulysses S. Grant expelled Jews from his
military district in Tennessee in 1862, blaming them for the mayhem surrounding
the war, something Lincoln apparently did not really mind Grant doing, but he
rescinded the order for political reasons.[70]

Publicly
vented anti-Semitism during the Civil War became heated and extreme, but subsided
after the war. Nevertheless, America was well on its way to becoming a thoroughly
anti-Semitic culture. By 1900, the United States was quite anti-Semitic, but
far from alone. The gains Jews had been making in Western Europe began eroding.
In France, the first Western European nation that emancipated its Jews, was the
birthplace of a new anti-Semitic fervor that helped lead to the Holocaust.

In 1853, the French diplomat
Comte Joseph de Gobineau published a book that distinguished between Aryan virtue
and Jewish degeneracy. In 1847 and 1863, Frenchman Ernst Renan published books
that argued for the inferiority of Jews. In 1886, Edouard Drumont published La
France juive, an infamous anti-Semitic tract. Those writings were hugely
popular and influenced millions of Europeans, and anti-Semitism was on the rise
throughout Europe again. Then there was World War I, the Russian Revolution,
the fiscal collapse of Germany after the war, the Great Depression and the rise
of Hitler and Fascism. Those days are well known, so I will not belabor them
here. What I wish to make clear is that anti-Semitism was not an aberration in
Germany. Anti-Semitism was universal throughout the Christian world in those
days, and it was most muted in the United States.

It
is probably an integral part of the human condition at this time, but when people
are under stress they often lash out at others, and during times of war and other
calamities, Jews were nearly always singled out for persecution in the Christian
world. From the first Crusade to the Great Depression, Jews had a difficult time
when their host nation underwent strain. That was partly due to the "cohesion"
of the Jews, keeping themselves separate and distinct from the majority population.

In America, the Civil War brought on a virulent
strain of anti-Semitism. It gradually escalated with the millions of Jewish immigrants
that fled Europe, and after World War I it erupted into outright hatred of Jews
in many places. In the early 1900s, a document emerged that was almost certainly
a forgery by the Russians during the pogrom days. It was titled the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. That document has given life to various conspiracy
theories of Jews taking over the world. It is nearly incoherent in places. Anti-Semitism
is alive and well today, with many right wing groups still believing that the
Protocols are genuine, and that Anne Frank's diary is a fake.

The
Israeli governmentis ruthless. They
are grabbing for as much power as they can, as all governments do. Menachem Begin was little more than a gangster.
Every government exploits its people. Israeli government officials do
not read the Protocols nightly before bedtime, but they probably study
Machiavelli. Self-serving, power-hungry people
run every government. That is the nature of the beast today. When anybody looks
at an ethnic or racial group, thinking that they are the problem, they are not
seeing the full picture, and are easily manipulated against their own interests.
Fortunately, in Israel recently they are beginning to teach their children the
nation's history more truthfully, with textbooks giving more factual accounts
of the Six Days War, where Israel was anything but the underdog, and their textbooks
for the first time mention the word "Palestinian." That progress has
been undone by the Israeli war against the Palestinians since 2000.

The
American right-wingers who see Israel as a problem, standing in the way of world
peace, are right. Yet, so is the United States, and far more so. The Jews are
not taking over the world, the capitalists already have. They are not one and
the same. A lust for power and greed are not limited
to any one ethnic or religious group, although Europeans and their descendants
have refined it to a science. There is one aspect of the Jewish journey worth
mentioning: peculiarly Jewish pathologies are partly due to the persecution they
endured for so long. Being forced to hide their identities, and fleeing back
and forth across Europe, while the only "valuable" things they could
take during their flight were gold and jewelry, probably created neuroses and
fears common to the Jewish people. All oppressed people have their characteristic
pathologies, largely due to their journeys.

Gary
Wean stumbled into a dark cabal of gangsters that runs Ventura County. Their
influence appears to be vast. Gary found that many of them were Jewish. He apparently
stumbled onto Jewish organized crime activities, which robbed the taxpayers of
billions of dollars. The biggest gangsters run the government. There
are probably Jewish gangsters with plenty of influence in California government
and elsewhere, as in the federal government. Again, those are self-serving Jews. They seem to have a racial/ethnic
allegiance, just as organized crime figures do everywhere. The Mafia has its
Italian brotherhood. The Chinese have their triads. Japan has its Yakuza. There
is the Mexican Mafia. There is the Irish mob. People such as George
Bush help run the Northern European Mafia, perhaps the world’s most powerful
organized crime group. At the game’s highest levels, the lust for power is colorblind,
and there might even be a woman or two playing there.

In
significant ways, the Jews of Israel are treating the Palestinians worse than
Hitler treated the Jews in the 1930s. It is extremely saddening to watch people
who should have learned a big lesson from their own history, doing the same thing
to others. Children who are beaten by their parents often grow up to beat their
children. People cannot seem to keep themselves from inflicting onto others what
happened to them. When the Jews said, "never again," after the death
camps were opened, they meant "never again" to Jews, not "never
again" to anybody. If they could do it to others, they would, and with the
Palestinians, they have. Noam Chomsky has written extensively about that phenomenon,
a Zionist Jew himself who lived in a kibbutz.

In
Europe, anti-Semitism was probably most muted in Britain. Britain made the first
legal move to give the Jews a "homeland," with the Balfour Declaration
in 1917. For Arabs who had been living in Palestine for thousands of years, dumping
a Jewish state on top of them was not salutary. In 1917, of the 600,000 people
living in Palestine, perhaps 100,000 were Jewish, and they had largely come there
during the previous generation, initiated by the Russian pogroms, and the settlements
were almost completely funded by the legendary Rothschild family (and naturally
the subject of many conspiracy theories). Although Arab people had been more
tolerant of Jews than any other people, most did not like the idea of their land
becoming a Jewish state.

European Jews
probably would not have much wanted to relocate to Palestine if they had not been
subject to a millennium of persecution in Europe. I am half-Scandinavian, and
I have no yearning to move back to Norway, although the Vikings did not have the
"Promised Land" myths that Jews had. The Jewish "homeland"
efforts by the Europeans were in some way related to the African "homeland"
effort by America after the slaves were freed, creating new countries in Africa,
such as Liberia, so they could ship all the "niggers"
back to Africa. There was certainly some altruism with those homeland plans,
but there was also a motivation to export undesirable people.

European
imperial ambition had been nibbling at the margins of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, and by 1900, British
and French imperialism had conquered the Middle East. It was the logical conclusion
of Britain's quest for global hegemony. A quarter of the globe was under British
rule in 1914. As with other empires at the height of its power, the decline would
soon come, and Britain would be unseated from its imperial perch by its offspring
and rival, the United States. The 1990s may be eventually seen as the beginning
of the end of the American Empire. Our economic hegemony
has been deteriorating for a generation, as Britain's had for a generation before
their empire disintegrated.

Most Middle
East friction today is obviously related to it sitting on the world's biggest
oil reserves. The current tragedy of Iraq is only the latest in a century of the white
man's greedy meddling in Arab affairs, visiting disaster onto them.

While
Britain was carving out a homeland for Jews in Palestine during World War I, wresting
it from the Turks, anti-Semitism in Europe would soon reach all-time highs. When
World War I began, many Jews saw Russia as their mortal enemy and Germany as their
savior. When the German army freed Poland from Russia, Polish Jews thought they
had been delivered from the enemy, and at that time, they were. Jews in Britain
were reluctant to enlist to fight Germany, when it was freeing the Jews of Poland
and Russia. After World War I was over, anti-Semitism subsided in some places,
while it took off elsewhere. There were pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine immediately
after the war, but Jews shared the general prosperity of the 1920s, and they did
not significantly migrate to Palestine until the Great Depression hit and anti-Semitism
began its final, tragic climb.

Arabs
resisted Jewish/British efforts in Palestine, the British did not help it by diplomatic
bungling, and Britain originally restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, then
opened it back up in the 1920s, but few Jews migrated there. A vocal Jewish faction
was fervently anti-Zionist, and anti-Zionist fervor from the Jews themselves hampered
the deal with Britain. Jews led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and throughout
the West people began equating Jews with Communists. To a degree that perception
was true, as the classless, collective spirit of Marx was related to the kibbutz
tradition of the Jews in Palestine, first begun in 1906 (Marx was partly inspired
by Native American societies), but what happened in Russia was starkly different
from what Marx had envisioned. It became another power grab, and a bloodbath
for Jews.

An effect of the Enlightenment
and the social movements of the 1800s was a new kind of Jew. Marx was one of
them, as was Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. They were non-Jewish Jews, and
were a significant fraction of Jews. They saw themselves as human beings whose
Jewishness was a byproduct of the social structure in their host nations. They
were the Jews behind the Communist movements, and they felt that when the political-social
changes happened that overthrew capitalism and the social conditions it helped
create, they would all become just people. No class, no ethnicity, just people.
In short, they denied their Jewishness, as it is commonly understood. They saw
themselves as completely secularized, de-ethnicized, and highly politicized.
It is a fascinating ideal, but it has not yet been attained on earth. What happened
in the Soviet Union was a grotesque caricature of attempting that ideal, mainly
because it was not voluntary. They were going to force uniformity onto humanity.
Banning religion altogether was part of the program. It was forced secularization.
They took the Enlightenment to the worst possible extreme. The Bolshevik Revolution
became very bloody. It became another power grab, not a realization of humanity’s
unity. Yet, Jews became identified with that revolution, but when it came time
to take it out on Jews, “Jewish” Jews were slaughtered, and about 70,000 Jews
were murdered in the civil war that raged in the Ukraine in the 1920s. Across
Eastern Europe, Jewish communities were attacked because they were associated,
however inaccurately, with Communism, leading to many deaths.

Meanwhile
in America, the Communist Revolution scared our capitalist society. Henry Ford
owned The Dearborn Independent, and in 1920 the paper began running a series
of articles attacking Jews, an attack that ran for almost two years solid, and
prominently featured The Protocols of Zion. Henry Ford was one of the
most committed anti-Semites that America ever had. Another noted anti-Semite
was Charles Lindbergh, the hero of transatlantic flight.

At
the same time Ford mounted an all-out propaganda attack on Jews, Germany was dealing
with the disastrous aftermath of World War I. Both World Wars were incidents
where the West battled over world control. Germany came late to the Industrial
Revolution, and they were not a traditional maritime nation as other Great Powers
were. When Germany finally came to the imperial table, there were only crumbs
left for them. Britain, France, Russia and the United States controlled most
of the globe, and the other European powers had imperial domains that were relatively
adequate, although the empires of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were but
a shadow of their former glory. Germany took what it could, and lost the battle.
Instead of coming to a responsible understanding of Germany's motivation, or even
looking at the iniquities they themselves inflicted upon the world, the "winners"
of World War I foisted on Germany onerous war reparations and took most of its
empire, which contributed to a series of events that damaged the German economy.

In the early 1920s a failed
artist and soldier, who hated the humiliation Germany had been subjected to at
war's end, gained inspiration from Henry Ford's attacks of the Jews, and also
lauded Martin Luther's diatribes against the Jews. The man would later tell the
Detroit News that his inspiration was Henry Ford. That failed artist's
name? Adolf Hitler.[71]
The anti-Jewish diatribes of one of America's greatest industrialists and the
father of Protestantism directly inspired Hitler.

Anti-Jewish
discrimination was widespread in America. Again, although American Jews had it
better than in any other Western nation, it was not wonderful. In the 1920s,
the industries that practiced discriminatory hiring practices against the Jews
were: utilities, banks, insurance companies, publishing houses, engineering and
architectural firms, advertising agencies, school districts, major industrial
firms, hospitals, universities, and law firms.[72]
Help wanted ads of the day specifically stated that only Christians need apply.
The peak year for that type of discrimination was in 1926. An examination of
27,000 job openings found that 90% discriminated against Jews. As in Europe,
the careers and jobs Jews held were the ones they were forced into, when all other
avenues of gainful employment were closed to them, and America was where Western
Jews had it the best.

In
1927, there were more than four million Jews in America, for the world's single-greatest
concentration of Jews. After more than a century of Russia's brutal rule, Poland
won its independence during World War I as the Russian Empire collapsed during
the revolution. When Wall Street collapsed and the Great Depression began in
1929, Poland and the Soviet Union contained about three million Jews each.
In 1924, the U.S. began setting immigration quotas by nationality, which greatly
reduced the Jewish immigration to America. One consequence was an increase
in immigration to Palestine.

The Great
Depression was a global event, and Germany's recovering economy was hammered by
the Depression. In the depths of the Great Depression, as national desperation
vaulted people like Hitler into power, Franklin Roosevelt was desperately trying
to flog the U.S. economy back to a semblance of health. 1933 was the darkest
year of the Great Depression. During 1933, my father's parents traveled
back and forth across America, Grapes of Wrath style, trying to find
work and food. The Dust Bowl drove them out of Kansas where they had been raised,
and they lived in Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Idaho before hearing about jobs
in the shipyards in Bellingham, Washington. When my father was born in 1936,
his mother was so malnourished that my father was born with rickets, weighed four
pounds and nearly died. He was the smallest child in his class until a growth
spurt at age fifteen.

Toward the Holocaust

As
with the JFK assassination and other controversies, if somebody
wants to have their sanity challenged, they can spend time assimilating the various
points of view regarding the years 1933 to 1945, especially pertaining to European
Jews and World War II. In many far right circles, Hitler was a tragic hero who
lost. The Jewish Holocaust never happened or was overblown, according
to some "scholarship." There are those who criticize the Holocaust
deniers, and those who criticize them. Another perspective is that the German
people were largely responsible for the Holocaust. Another perspective is
that Hitler was nearly solely responsible for it. Another
perspective is that America and the West had a hand in letting it happen or stood
by and watched, which includes David Wyman and many others, including most mainstream
historians. Another perspective sees German industrialists having a big hand
in it, clamoring for concentration camp labor, then America hired
some of the worst Nazis after the war was over (Christopher Simpson). There
are standard texts on the Jewish Holocaust (Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, Leni
Yahil). There are large, comprehensive tales of the war. There are books about
how crazy it all was (Paul Fussell, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky), or how the Jewish
Holocaust was similar to the Native American Holocaust
(David Stannard, Ward Churchill.). There are books about Japanese atrocities
(Iris Chang), or about how badly Germans suffered in the war's
aftermath. There are books about building the bomb and nuking Japan (Peter Wyden, Richard Rhodes, Gar Alperovitz).
There are many documentaries on Jewish Holocaust survivors, perpetrators, witnesses,
etc. Lifetimes can be spent digesting the various viewpoints of those times and
events.

Hitler came to power in 1933,
and Jews began fleeing Germany. America was not frightened by what happened in
Germany, just as Europe did not get too excited when Spain's
Inquisition oppressed mere Jews and Spain killed
off millions of New World natives in its lust
for gold, what Germany was doing to its Jewish citizens soon after Hitler
came to power did not excite much comment in America or anywhere else in the West.
Anti-Semitism was not only rising to unparalleled levels in Germany, but throughout
the West. In America, as it again dealt with a national calamity, Jews became
the scapegoats. Anti-Semitism reached all-time levels in the United States during
the 1930s, only to be surpassed during World War II, to peak after the
Jewish Holocaust was over.

When Hitler
came to power, the greatest physicist of all time was in America, weighing his
options in an increasingly anti-Semitic world. In 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting
Cal Tech in California. In 1919, there was a supposed confirmation of Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity, whereby starlight was bent more than Newton's theories
predicted when it passed by the sun during a total eclipse. Einstein became a
huge international celebrity in the wake of the announcement of those findings,
which are now known to be premature, as they did not prove what they purported
to. Nevertheless, "relativity" was the word on everybody's tongue immediately
after World War I, but in Germany, where the Jewish Einstein had been persuaded
to live as his scientific career blossomed, anti-relativity companies sprouted
up, led by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Phillip Lenard and others. Relativity
was being called a Jewish plot to corrupt physics.

In
1933, while Einstein was heading back to Germany to begin planning his move to
America, Nazi storm troopers ransacked Einstein's Berlin apartment and eventually
seized his home, declaring Einstein to be an enemy of the state. Einstein never
returned to Germany. Although Einstein was the world's most celebrated scientist,
American groups were trying to prevent Einstein's migration, most particularly
the Women's Patriot Corporation, that labeled Einstein "a Communist and menace
to American institutions," and part of a conspiracy to take over the world.
There was a rumored Nazi-sponsored $5000 price on Einstein's head, and he hid
out in England for a few weeks before coming to America to stay.[73]

Einstein
was fortunate, being able to migrate because of his celebrity. Other prominent
Jews also found ready haven in the West. Most German Jews were not so fortunate.
Similar to the argument that everybody in the world has some hand
in what is happening in Iraq today, nobody in the West could claim they had
nothing to do with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. Most Jews would have
left Germany in a heartbeat, but there was no friendly haven to flee to. Nobody
in the West wanted Jews coming into their countries. Anti-Semitism was at its
all-time high in Europe on the eve of World War II. The capitalistic
system had collapsed due to its systemic greed, and nobody wanted to take
in Jews. In America, the Western Jewish haven, it was hard times. During the
1930s, America severely tightened its immigration laws, and Jews in particular
were denied admittance.

In 1932, six
months before Hitler came to power, one British publication stated,

"A crusade of anti-Semitism has been raging
from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Baltic to the Aegean Sea, during the past
six months, with a vindictiveness that almost surpasses all previous manifestations
of anti-Jewish hatred since the end of the war."[74]

That
was before Hitler came to power, and it only escalated after that. In
those years, Jews were nearly down there with blacks in America. Franklin Roosevelt
became president in 1933. He was a politician from New York, and brought Jews
into his New Deal agencies (furthering the "Commie" perception of Jews).
That led to murmurs throughout America that Jews were running the country. The
1934 resolution submitted to Capitol Hill to express "surprise and pain"
at the Jewish treatment in Germany died in committee.

The
Jews were fleeing to where they would be taken in. They began pouring into Palestine,
and Arabs were not happy with it. In Palestine, Arab leadership was militant
and uncooperative. In 1936, there was an Arab uprising in Palestine, and the
British drastically curtailed Jewish immigration there. Zionist plans were deeply
divided by Jewish factionalism.

In
America, Father Charles Coughlin personified the ancient animosity of Catholics
toward Jews. He had a weekly national radio show heard by millions of Americans.
He was the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s.[75] His diatribes
against Jews were breathtaking. Across America, anti-Semitism was raging. Even
a place as genteel as Minnesota began having anti-Jewish campaigns. There were
even Nazi rallies in America in 1939. On November 9-10, 1938, Germany had its
infamous Kristallnacht, which made the world collectively wake up a little.
That event even made Roosevelt speak of his shock, but like the politician he
was, nothing was done about it in America. A little more than a week after Kristallnacht,
Coughlin gave his most amazing speech, minimizing the barbarity of Kristallnacht
and going into a long attack on the Jews, producing forged Nazi documents to support
his bizarre contentions.

Coughlin's
diatribes helped stir up immense anti-Jewish hatred in America. Coughlin inspired
an organization called the Christian Front, which in 1938 had chapters in America's
eastern cities, where 85% of America's Jews lived. At Christian Front rallies,
there were calls to "liquidate the Jews of America."[76]
That was four years before anybody in America heard of Hitler's Final Solution.
At one Christian Front rally, the speaker invoked General Sheridan's observation regarding the natives,
and said that the only good Jews were in the cemetery. When a Jew passing by
retorted that he was a good Jew and still alive, he was immediately arrested for
disturbing the peace.[77]

In
Europe, German Jews were desperate, many fleeing anywhere they could. Others
thought they could ride it out in Germany, and other nations were not exactly
welcoming them. Jews had been mistreated in Europe for a thousand years, and
it eventually got better. Those relative few chose what they thought was the
frying pan, but it turned out to be the fire. A year before the outbreak of World
War II, Europe closed its doors to fleeing Jews. In late 1938, France and Holland
closed their doors, not admitting any more Jews. Sweden and Denmark tightened
already severe restrictions on Jewish immigrants, even forcibly returning Jews
to Germany who did not have the proper papers.[78] In the United
States, the mood was often one of sheer hatred.

In
1938, a public opinion poll found 77% of respondents against the idea of letting
more German-Jew refugees into America. In 1939, there was a bill introduced in
Washington to allow 20,000 refugee Jewish children into America. The bill met
with strong and vociferous opposition across America. Roosevelt refused to endorse
the wildly unpopular bill, and it died a quiet death. The next year when war
broke out, America opened its arms to English children fleeing Britain.

In May 1939, the world observed
the spectacle of the Saint Louis' voyage. A boatload of more than 900 desperate
Jews set sail from Hamburg, told that they could gain entrance to Cuba, although
Cuba had already invalidated their permits. When arriving in Cuba, they were
denied admittance, and then began a desperate series of negotiations for a haven
someplace in the world. Many of them had quota numbers for the United States.
The United States refused them entry, as did every other country. The boat ended
up sailing for days along the Florida coast on its way back to Europe, it passengers
looking longingly toward America, but the door was closed. With great effort
and a payment of $500,000 by the Jewish Defense League, Belgium, Holland, Britain
and France were persuaded to take in the passengers. Most of those not taken
in by Britain eventually ended up in concentration camps. That was how the West
reacted to the Jewish plight on the eve of World War II.

One
argument directed toward my work has been that European nations refused to admit
Jews because they knew the Germans would overrun them soon, so they could not
protect the Jews, even if they let them in. That argument has no agreement with
any historical facts I could find. For one thing, no nation expected to be overrun
by the Germans. Germany was militant, but there was the Soviet Union, Britain
and France nearby, and nobody expected them to run over Europe as they did. The
success of the German Blitzkrieg amazed even the German generals. At the war's
beginning, the Soviet Union, which was Germany's ally for the moment, was shocked
at how rapidly Germany's forces marched across Poland, and scrambled to get in
on Poland's spoils.[79]
No historian has hinted that the people of the occupied countries resisted Jewish
immigration because the Germans would overrun their nation and exterminate the
Jews anyway. The Final Solution was disbelieved by most who heard about it while
it was happening, even Jews. When the rare Jew would escape the death camps and
make it back to his community, his neighboring Jews would often think he was crazy,
and refuse to believe his wild tale.

The
rapid German victories over the Dutch, French and British forces amazed all involved.
An axiom of warfare is that the generals are always prepared to fight the previous
war. The French heavily fortified the Maginot Line (the axis of conflict during
the trench warfare of World War I) in 1939, as their strategists prepared for
the previous war. The German Blitzkrieg easily defeated the French, and the Maginot
Line was meaningless. In May of 1940, Winston Churchill, the new Prime Minister, was
awakened by the French Premier, who told him excitedly, "We have been defeated!
We are beaten!" Churchill refused to believe that the French army could
have been defeated in a week.[80] The modern warfare
of the Germans took Western Europe by surprise.

Nobody
in the Gentile world expected the Final Solution to be enacted by the Nazis.
Barbara Tuchman said that if the Gentile world knew that the
Nazis were about to exterminate the Jews, they would have applauded. I will be
gentler, and say that if the rest of Europe knew what was about to happen, they
may have done something about it. In light of what
is happening in Iraq today and the West's response to it, that may be too
generous an assessment. In a sense, the extent that Germany took anti-Semitism
was incomprehensible to the general populace. Again, if people had known what
Hitler and the Germans were capable of, they may have been more welcoming
to Jewish refugees.

All the same, another
argument directed at my work is that because nobody really knew what the Nazis
were capable of, their inaction does not make them "culpable." Culpability
is not the point of this essay. If somebody comes begging to my door and I send
them away, and the next week I see them dead alongside the road, I can tell myself
I had no idea they would end up dead. Does that mean that I had no contribution
to their fate? Lawyerly types make that exact argument. Claiming ignorance
of the future (which we can all do) does not lessen my responsibility, and my
lesson should be to ask myself what I could have done, so the next time I do not
slam the door in the face of another beggar. While legalistic attitudes prevail, we will continue to chart
our path of disaster, and when the next one happens, we can say, as the German
people said after the death camps were opened, "We did not know." Germans
who could smell the scent of burning flesh from the nearby camp’s ovens, and who
watched prisoners being beaten in town by their guards, still said, "I did
not know."

That nobody let in
Jews before World War II is evidence that they did not expect the Final Solution
to be enacted. Whether the nations were in the shadow of Germany, as the Netherlands
was, or as distant as the United States. The Jews had been fleeing back and forth
across Europe for nearly two thousand years, and desperate attempts by Jews to
flee Germany in the 1930s, and nobody else in Europe wanting to take them in,
has rich historical precedence.

Sweden
was a neutral power during both World Wars. They did not open their arms to fleeing
Jews during the 1930s. On the eve of war, they even tightened the restrictions
on Jews moving there. A main reason was that labor unions and others did not
want aliens in their nation, competing for jobs. When war broke out, Sweden had
24,000 foreign citizens in their country, for 0.4% of its population. Sweden
was one of the "generous" European nations that let Jews in, although
Aryans were let in to stay three times as often on the eve of war. The Swedes
approved an "extraordinary gesture" of letting 500 children refugees
in, because a women's group agitated for it. The Swedes knew the status of the
Final Solution as it developed, and as it was being carried out, Sweden did nothing.[81]

Switzerland behaved the best of the Continental
nations, but that is not saying much. Anti-Semitism was rampant there too, and
in 1942 they further tightened their restrictions on refugees, a decision not
reversed until July 1944, when the writing was on the wall for Germany. Many
thousands of Jews died because of Switzerland's policies.[82]
In recent years, they have been haunted by the scandal of knowledge that the Swiss
banks laundered the Jewish assets that the Nazis plundered, such as the gold from
teeth that were extracted from the Holocaust victims in the death camps.[83] The Swiss prevailed
upon the Nazis to put a "J" on Jewish passports so the Swiss could identify
them, so they could turn them back. Germany resisted that Swiss policy, because
they felt they would not be able to get rid of Jews to places such as Switzerland,
but the Swiss prevailed.

For every
Jewish refugee that made it into Switzerland (about 22,000 made it into Switzerland),
another was turned back, usually to their deaths. The Swiss banks stonewalled
attempts by survivors of the Holocaust to withdraw their money from the banks,
or recovery attempts by the heirs of Jewish depositors who died in the Holocaust.
The banks demanded documentary proof for people who died in Auschwitz, similar
to U.S. demands of citizenship for Americans interned in the camps. Some of it
was understandable, but hiding behind bureaucratic procedures has been used for
millennia, and was no exception regarding the Holocaust. Some Swiss banks' behaviors
were truly scandalous. The banks set up a Holocaust survivors' fund recently,
as did the Swiss government, as a very belated gesture, but better late than never.
American officers also looted Nazi plunder at the end of World War II.[84]

As
with nearly all Jewish Holocaust narratives, a hero here and there dots the landscape,
with rare acts of human kindness. Paul Grueninger was one of the few Swiss heroes.
In 1938, the border captain altered about 3600 Jewish refugee passports to allow
them to stay in Switzerland. For those heroic acts of a true humanitarian, he
was fired, prosecuted, fined and spent the rest of his life, until 1971, living
in poverty, unable to get a job, and was even the subject of a smear campaign
regarding letting in those Jews. He died a broken man. He was not acquitted
of the charges against him until 1995, after his family had tried clearing his
name for many years, after five attempts.[85] All too often, that is the fate
of the true heroes in this world, vilified while they live, with posthumous recognition,
if any. As in all nations, not all Swiss citizens agreed with what their government
was doing, and Swiss citizens were more critical of Hitler's regime than their
government was, and many Swiss citizens voluntarily housed the Jewish refugees
who made it into Switzerland.

Along Europe's
periphery, some nations were relatively heroic, their anti-Semitism not as entrenched
as in Europe's heart. During the war, Denmark, Finland and Bulgaria saved a substantial
portion of their Jews. Denmark saved about 100% of their 5000 to 7000 Jews, smuggling
them to Sweden, who, when prevailed upon by their neighbor, finally took in the
Jews. Finland saved their 2000 Jews. Bulgaria was a more mixed affair, with
most of Bulgaria's Jews being spared, but the Bulgarian army also rounded up thousands
of Jews, sending them to Treblinka and other death camps. About 10,000 Jews were
saved by a few nations' heroic actions, while more than five million Jews went
to their deaths. Reducing the Jewish death toll by 0.2% by peripheral nations
is something that people can look to in finding some hope and consolation
from the Holocaust.

Here and there
across Europe, and even in Germany, some people risked their lives by hiding Jews.
Those people have been lionized, yet they nearly invariably said that their actions
were not heroic, but something that anybody would have done. Their modesty is
understandable, but they were extremely rare. Noam Chomsky says that what has
driven his tireless efforts for human rights for the past thirty-five years is
so he can look himself in the mirror. Yes, he does, but the highly developed
conscience of a Noam Chomsky is extremely rare. For those who hid Jews or engage
in activities as Chomsky does, their answer is the same. They say they are only
doing the decent thing, or trying to keep their consciences' clear. They are
not superhuman, just rare.

On the Jewish
Holocaust's causes, there is a vast spectrum of opinion. One of this site’s themes,
as the staunch pacifist that I am, is that violence always begets violence. There will
be no war to end all wars, except the one that extinguishes the human species.
The Jewish Holocaust took place in the world’s most violent culture: Europe.
The Holocaust took place in the middle of a war that killed about sixty million
people (and perhaps even 100 million), the bloodiest war of all time, so far.
The Jewish Holocaust was only about ten percent of that total, or less. On one
hand, it was merely part of the scenery of murder that raged across the white
man's world. Yes, the Jews were singled out (Gypsies and Slavs were too) for
a unique fate, a fate that was the culmination of a thousand years of abuse by
the Christian world. Yet, what made Germany into such a hotbed of it?

In Paul Johnson's A History of the Jews,
he discusses the constellation of reasons for the Holocaust.[86] First, and perhaps
most primary and immediate, was World War I. The German people had just experienced
a period of unprecedented prosperity and modernization when World War I happened.
They were flexing their muscles as a nation, feeling their power and glory. As
with Japan, who nurtured their imperial ambition for generations, wanting to be
successful imperial overlords as the British, French, Russians and Americans were,
Germany had grand designs for coming to the imperial table. The British, French
and Americans had to be their role models, to an extent. Yet, they had
already gobbled up the globe. The British Empire spanned
the globe, owning a quarter of it. The French Empire was second to Britain's
in size, where their imperial domains included parts of the Middle East, Southeast
Asia, Africa and a share of China.

The
United States, the first breakaway colony, had come to dominate the entire Western
Hemisphere. It had its Monroe Doctrine and
Roosevelt Corollary, which staked out the
entire Western Hemisphere (with the exception of Canada) as its imperial domain.
It was refining a new form of colonialism that the British were experimenting
with, known as neocolonialism, whereby the American flag did not necessarily fly over its subject
nations, but the U.S. was in charge nevertheless. European nations were not allowed
a free hand in plundering Latin America; it was the United States' game and nobody
else's. Even so, America expanded its empire impressively. Other nations such
as the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese had remnants of their empires dotting the
globe. The white man had a claim on virtually every valuable acre of planet earth,
and the Germans had little of it to befit their new stature as a great nation.

The Germans had few distant lands to plunder,
and to the east of them was another empire: the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire
spanned northern Asia and bordered Germany. Those realities led Germany to war
against the other imperial powers. After the war, the imperial powers humiliated
Germany with onerous war reparations and took most of its imperial hinterland.
As Johnson observed, a primary effect of World War I, besides stunting Germany's
ambition, was making German society a more violent place. Where violence in civil
life was unknown in the years before World War I, one of the consequences of the
war was a generation of men who became intimately familiar with the art of murder.

The psychology of warfare and soldiers shows
that young men do not naturally desire to murder other people, particularly those
they have never met. What turns young men into murderers is a culture
that encourages violence, as in its media and ideology. The appeal to patriotism
is a primary brainwashing tactic, something Hermann
Goering said was common to all nations. In addition, dehumanizing the "enemy"
is a vital component of the program. If the young men do not feel like they are
killing fellow human beings, they can do it much easier. Even with all that,
young men do not readily commit violent acts. In numerous accounts, whether it
is the Japanese raping Nanking citizens, the Germans annihilating Jews in Eastern
Europe, American soldiers killing Native American women, Japanese soldiers or
Vietnamese civilians, or French revolutionaries killing each other, their first
kills do not come easily. The witnesses and participants to the acts describe
an inner revulsion at first, but with each kill, their inhibitions gradually cease,
and some even glory in it after awhile. They are on the highway to hell, but
most people readily develop inner mechanisms that allow them to continue doing
it. Many American soldiers have crossed that threshold in macabre
ways.

Christopher
Browning’s Ordinary Men examines the phenomenon of German Reserve Police
Battalion 101 that became a Jew-killer squad in Poland. The men of Reserve Police
Battalion 101 were largely drafted from Hamburg, and were simple barbers, plumbers
and the like, largely men more than thirty years old. They were not Nazis, but
typical Germans, relatively apolitical. They eventually became adroit Jew-killers,
directly killing about 40,000 Jews and deporting another 45,000 to the death camps.
The book’s most chilling sentence is its last one,

“If
the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances,
what group of men cannot?”[87]

As
with a famous psychology experiment at Stanford, where “normal” people played
the prisoner and guard game, about a third of the guards quickly became sadistic,
about half became “tough but fair,” and less than 20% became “good guards,” who
tried being kind to their charges (or in the case of Reserve Police Battalion
101, somehow shirked their killing duties). The same statistics applied to the
men of Reserve Police Battalion 101.[88]

After
World War I, violence in German society became increasingly commonplace, and political
ideologies readily adopted violent strategies. That was not only in Germany,
but also in other war participants, such as Russia and across Eastern Europe.
The rise of Hitler was not unusual, although historians still grope for a full
understanding of it. Anti-Semitism was an integral part of the day’s German mentality,
and the aftermath of World War I made violence an increasingly acceptable aspect
of the day's ideology. Murdering Jews and other political/ideological targets
became commonplace in German society immediately after the war, with the perpetrators
rarely brought to trial, and given light sentences even if convicted. Hitler's
philosophy helped create an atmosphere where the Jew eventually became seen as
subhuman. "Vermin" was a typical appellation given to Jews back then.

When
Germans were killing Jews in the early 1920s, in America similar events were happening.
Recently, mass graves have been discovered from the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
In the wake of the oil boom in Oklahoma, many blacks escaped the South and its
lynch-happy, Jim Crow environment. They formed
one of America’s most prosperous black communities. Booker T. Washington characterized
the Greenwood section of Tulsa as the "Negro’s Wall Street." Racists
referred to Greenwood as "Little Africa."

Blacks
were forced into segregated living, as the Jews in their ghettos had been for
centuries. The Tulsa police were virulently racist, allying themselves with the
Ku Klux Klan. The event that touched off the "race riot" was when a
black shoeshine man was falsely accused of accosting a white woman in an elevator.
The Tulsa Tribune ran an editorial entitled "To Lynch a Negro Tonight"
the next day, and a mob of 2000 white people surrounded the jail, ready for a
lynching. About 75 black men heroically stood in front of them, to prevent the
lynching. As often happens, as the whites assaulted the black men a shot rang
out, and then it was "open season on niggers." Armed bands of whites
rampaged through the black section of town, burning buildings and shooting any
black on sight. The "riot" made history when a plane dropped dynamite
onto the black neighborhoods, for history’s first bombings by plane. Several
days later, hundreds of black people lay dead, and were buried in mass graves.
Six thousand blacks were rounded up and imprisoned. The official report stated
that less than forty people died in the "riot." Mass graves were recently
discovered and exhumed.[89] The death toll is probably at
least 300 people.

Is what happened
in post-war Germany so difficult to understand, particularly as the United States
is killing thousands of Iraqi children each month
as I am writing this? Between Southeast Asia and Iraq alone, the United States
has probably been primarily responsible for the deaths of more people than the
number of Jews who died in the Nazi death camps, distant nations that did us no
harm, not by any stretch of the imagination. Hitler, no matter how crazy he was,
had perhaps more justification for what he did to Jews than the United States
had for what it has done to Southeast Asia and Iraq. If the Nazis were the most
evil regime of all time, what does that make today's United States? Hitler and
his boys were practitioners of evil, but they have also been scapegoats.
Nazi Germany was not that greatly different than today's United States, especially
as the United States has a currently unelected president, from a family
that openly supported Nazi Germany.

The
United States has the world's largest prison population, which is increasingly
filled with political prisoners and people who did not commit what any rational
person would consider a crime. During the last fifty years, our nation has been
primarily responsible for the deaths of several million
people and the continued misery of hundreds of hundreds of millions, if not
billions. The Nazis were minor leaguers; imperial wannabes who could not make
the grade, who did not really take it out on the Jews until their military advances
were blunted, and they realized that they would not roll over the world. Hitler
had no monopoly on telling the Big Lie. In Nazi Germany
and the occupied nations, some noble souls stood up to the evil, risking their
lives to hide Jews. They were extremely rare, but they existed. Some Americans
are trying to end the awesome injustices that the United States inflicts on the
planet today. They are also rare, but they exist. German citizens themselves
were not at great risk for not playing the game properly, but a person in the
Nazi-occupied Ukraine, for instance, would be summarily executed along with their
families for hiding Jews. In America, a death squad does not usually visit dissident
writers, although it happens, as with the FBI's COINTELPRO program and what it
did to Fred Hampton. In the imperial hinterlands however, El Salvadoran dissidents to the U.S. Empire were taken
out and shot without a second thought by U.S.-trained troops, and their heads
mounted on poles alongside roads as an instructive lesson for other dissidents
who might dare to raise their voice.[90]

The
Holocaust was a phenomenon that derived from a millennium of Western racism and
anti-Semitism. It also derived from the incessant warrior mentality of Europe,
a culture far more warlike and deadly than any other in history. It also derived
from the greed that drove the quest
for empire that characterized all the European nations, which has evolved into capitalism.

For
all the heroic actions of Denmark during World War II, they had a small Jewish
population (the nearby Netherlands had a Jewish population of 140,000 in 1939)
because they were less than welcoming to Jews over the centuries. Many Jews were
in Eastern Europe because they had been booted out of Western Europe centuries
earlier. The anti-Semitism in Scandinavia was more muted than that of mainland
Europe, but far from noble.

We all
have a hand in world events, although the causal relationship can be difficult
to see. As a rule, people do not see the relationship between pumping cheap gasoline
in America, for instance, and the deaths of children in Iraq, East Timor and Nigeria.
Those pumping the cheap gasoline are beneficiaries of the carnage, however indirect
they may think it is. In America, people do not usually see that their fast food
hamburgers were produced by the unspeakable suffering
of animals enslaved to an incredibly inhumane system, served by people oppressed
by the capitalistic system. Those Americans
usually do not see the relationship between their cheap running shoes and the
neocolonial system that has virtual slaves making those shoes in ghastly working
environments in U.S. client states such as Indonesia.
Americans rarely see the relationship between their cheap bananas and the mass
murder and capitalistic oppression in Central America that keeps those cheap bananas coming.
Projecting the "evil" onto Saddam Hussein or Hitler (or the large corporations)
is convenient, but is one more way to play the victim game.

Another
painful aspect of the Jewish Holocaust is that the Third Reich did not originally
want to exterminate the Jews. They wanted to get rid of them, but nobody wanted
them.

Howard Zinn wrote in his Declarations
of Independence,

"Not
only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, war itself bought on
the Final Solution of the genocide. This is not to remove responsibility from
Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions,
cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic
distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was
forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of war created an atmosphere
in which the policy turned to genocide. This is the view of Princeton historian
Arnold Mayer, in his book Why Did the Heavens not Darken, and it is supported
by the chronology - that not until Germany was at war was the Final Solution adopted.

"Hilberg,
in his classic work on the Holocaust says, 'From 1938 to 1940, Hitler made extraordinary
and unusual attempts to bring about a vast emigration scheme… the Jews were not
killed before the emigration policy was literally exhausted.'The
Nazis found that the Western powers were not anxious to cooperate in emigration
and that no one wanted the Jews."[91]

The
voyage of the Saint Louis was part of Germany's forced emigration strategy.
They forced Jews onto boats and made them sail down the Danube, or forced them
into frontiers where they then snuck into Western nations, but nobody wanted them.
Many Jews wanted to get into Palestine, but in the interest of preserving "stability"
in the region (placating the Arabs, not dumping Jews on them), Britain drastically
limited migration to the region. Consequently, Britain let in some Jews, the
only European nation that did to any significant degree. Its policy was more
to keep the Jews out of Palestine than it was welcoming the Jews to Britain.

Raul Hilberg is probably the world's greatest
Holocaust scholar. He wrote Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, which provides
penetrating insights into the mentalities of the players in the Jewish Holocaust.
The word "hero" does not appear in the book's title. The most noble
and heroic people of those days were those who simply helped others when they
could give it. Those few who hid Jews at the risk of their lives in Europe were
probably the most heroic of all, and as a group the only people whose deeds were
truly selfless. Hilberg observed that those "altruists and humanitarians"
sometimes were embarrassed by the praise heaped on them after the war, and usually
replied that they were only doing the decent thing, something that anybody would
do.[92] Hilberg
demonstrated that nearly everybody had a hand in the Jewish Holocaust to one degree
or another. Whether it was lawyers and accountants doing the technical work of
digesting the loot from the Aryanization program,
doctors actively involved in barring German Jews from the medical profession to
eliminate the competition, churches that provided certificates of Aryan descent
of its parishioners, or "bystanders" such as the allied nations, or
the Pope quietly watching the Nazis seize and ship Jews from Rome, within shouting
distance of the Vatican, everybody had a hand in it. Some were more actively
involved than others, but there were few heroes and saints, and various levels
of complicity for virtually everybody else.

World
War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and the Jewish
fate became clearer. While the Final Solution was finally formulated and carried
out, anti-Semitism in America increased. In a 1942 opinion poll, when
Americans were asked to name the greatest threats to America, Jews came in third,
behind the Germans and Japanese.[93] In polls given in the 1940s to
the question, "Have you heard any criticism or talk against the Jews in the
last six months?" It steadily climbed from 46% in 1940, to an all-time high
of 64% in 1946.[94]
In 1942, a poll asked American high school students which groups, of seven listed,
would be their last choice as a roommate. Only two groups received more than
a ten-percent response rate. Blacks were 78%, and Jews 45%. In the same month,
factory workers were asked which groups they least wanted to move to their neighborhood.
It was the same list the high school students saw, and was 72% blacks, 42% Jews
and 28% Chinese.[95]

The
first official news in America that the Nazis were exterminating European Jews
was reported in the New York Times on November 25, 1942. The article stated
that the State Department confirmed that the Nazis had already systematically
murdered two million Jews. That story was reported on page ten. There was no
outrage in America. Roosevelt made no comment on the story, and no reporter asked
him about it. No politician made an issue of it. It was a non-story. Few really
cared if Jews were being slaughtered, especially when there were Nazis and (especially)
Japs to fight. A 1942 poll showed that 66% of Americans wanted the battle against
the Japanese in the Pacific to take precedence over battling Germany.[96]

While
the Final Solution was being carried out, the State Department purposefully tightened
restrictions on Jewish immigration to America. Many American Jews did not want
more Jews immigrating to America, because each new Jew further inflamed American
anti-Semitism, and the United States was the great savior of Jews in World
War II.

The infamous voyage of the
Saint Louis, the national protest regarding letting
in 20,000 Jewish children refugees smuggled out of Germany and Austria, the Nazi
rallies in America and the pervasive anti-Semitism were all part of 1939 America.
Across America were Silver Shirt stores that sold anti-Jewish propaganda. The
anti-Semitism was naturally the worst where Jews lived, mainly on America's East
Coast. The embrace of the Fascist systems of Germany and Italy by American industrialists,
the mainstream media and politicians, was also part of the terrain. Jews were
seen as Communists in America, furthering anti-Semitic hatred. Many Americans
saw Jews getting jobs in New Deal agencies as ominous. More than half of Americans
wanted Jews segregated as blacks were. Every nation tightened down the
screws on Jewish immigration on the eve of war.

While
Jews found employment in New Deal agencies, old-line agencies such as the State
Department, War Department, etc., were dominated by Eastern Oligarchy types, and
were against hiring Jews. The State Department guided foreign policy, just as
it does today. They controlled immigration. Ivy Leaguers staffed the State Department.
They were decidedly unsympathetic to the Jewish plight. In early 1940, Breckenridge
Long, the American Ambassador to Italy who thought that Fascism was great, became
the assistant Secretary of State. Long soon began directing the State Department
to curtail Jewish immigration into America, and in an infamous June 1940 memo,
Long informed his people how to bureaucratically thwart potential immigrants.
At that time, Jews were desperately trying to flee Europe, particularly via France
and Spain. Long's leadership provided the desired result, and the already paltry
immigration to America was quickly cut in half. Long initiated other measures,
which brought immigration to a standstill by the summer of 1941. That was months
before Pearl Harbor, and America was the world's "great neutral power"
at that time.

By the summer of 1941,
Hitler's euthanasia policy was underway in Germany. It was not covered up very
well, and Germans discovered what was happening and protested. The first crematoria
incinerated the insane, retarded and otherwise flawed of Germany. As German people
began protesting the euthanasia program, the Third Reich began tightening the
security of such extermination projects, paving the way for death camp security
afterwards.

By the winter of 1941, the
German offensive was blunted in Russia, and the Hitler's grandiose designs for
a purified world, under glorious German hegemony, began evaporating, and the turn
to the Final Solution at Wannsee in January 1942 gave a new direction to the German
goal. If Germany could not conquer the world, it would at least cleanse its corner
of the world of inferior races.

The Final
Solution was well underway by early 1942, and the industrialization of genocide
was undertaken for the first time. The death factories of Poland were built and
began churning out their unspeakable product. The November 1942 New York Times
article was a tardy admission of what knowledgeable observers of World War II
already knew. Jewish leaders began lobbying the White House in late 1942, to
no effect.

In early 1943, American Jews
began agitating for U.S. action regarding the slaughter of Europe's Jews. While
Jews began pressing for action, the State Department was instructing its Swiss
office to stop forwarding reports of the Final Solution. They were actively covering-up
the Holocaust, in an early instance of Holocaust denial. Jewish activism got
the U.S. government to convene a conference at Bermuda between British and American
diplomats, the Jews' best friends in the West. The April 1943 Bermuda conference
accomplished nothing, mainly because the attendees were told to not accomplish
anything. The conference was calculated to give the appearance of concern.
By late 1943, the Third Reich's death machine had consumed millions of Jews.
There were a handful of national politicians in America who sided with the Jewish
plight, the most prominent being Will Rogers Junior, a congressional representative
from Oklahoma and the part-Cherokee son of Will Rogers. Rogers joined the
Bergson Group, which was a small but highly active group in America, lobbying
for U.S. government action. On October 6, 1943, 4000 rabbis presented a petition
to the White House to plead for action on behalf of Europe's Jews. Roosevelt
begged off from attending the presentation due to a schedule conflict, and had
his vice-president accept the petition. Roosevelt's calendar for that day shows
that he had time to accept the petition, but chose not to.

There
were some highly placed Jews in U.S. government. The relatively few Jews saved
by America in World War II can partly thank the Jewish Henry Morgenthau Junior,
the Secretary of the Treasury, for directing the Treasury Department to investigate
why Jews were not getting into America, when the death factories were at full
production.

An infamous incident regarding
America, Britain and the Jews occurred over an offer the Nazis made to sell 70,000
Romanian Jews for about $9 million. The State Department blocked the deal. The
Treasury Department became involved and approved the deal. During the Treasury
Department investigation that Morgenthau initiated, documents surfaced which detailed
further State Department complicity in the Jewish Holocaust. Not only did the
State Department memo surface that ordered its Swiss office to not forward Holocaust
reports, but two other documents were discovered, one created by the State Department,
the other by the British Foreign Office.

The
State Department and the British Foreign Office were of like mind on the Romanian
deal, which they worked in unison to sabotage. The British document stated that
they opposed the Romanian Jew purchase due to the "difficulty of disposing
of any considerable number of refugees should they be rescued." The State
Department document stated the "danger" that the Nazis might "turn
over" a large number of Jewish refugees. Those two diplomatic bodies were
genuinely afraid that the Nazis might give them those 70,000 Jews instead of gassing
them. Morgenthau wrote that those two august bodies' behavior amounted to "diplomatic
double-talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death" for European
Jews.[97] While
that scandal was hatching, Long testified in a session on Capitol Hill, where
he lied about how many immigrants (he greatly exaggerated it), and Jews in particular,
had been let into the United States during the critical years.

Morgenthau's
Treasury Department issued a report on the scandal, titled "Report to the
Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews."
Morgenthau met with Roosevelt on January 16, 1944, and laid out the facts. Ever
the politician, Roosevelt foresaw a stinking mess coming up soon in the Congress
and Senate, and other activism that was about to make the Jews' fate a public
event. Six days after the meeting, Roosevelt issued executive order 9417, creating
the War Refugee Board (WRB). It prevented the looming scandal, yet the wording
of his statement carefully excluded the word "Jew," and the agency had
virtually no funding and almost no cooperation from any other governmental agency.
John Pehle of the Treasury Department was named to head the agency, and with little
funding and almost no cooperation from any other agency, the WRB did its best
to help Jews escape the death machine in Europe, and may have saved some. The
WRB was virtually alone among all U.S. governmental agencies in helping Europe's
Jews.

There are other acts by the U.S.
government worth reporting. Part of the charade of America caring about Jewish
suffering was establishing a refugee camp on American soil. It was established
in the countryside in New York. It took in less than 1000 Jews, and its stated
intention was to ship them back to Europe when the war was over. It was more
of a public relations stunt than any help to the Jews.

Jewish leaders continually
lobbied the White House during the war's last year, and one request repeatedly
made was for the Allied forces to bomb the crematoria at Auschwitz. The military
gave interesting excuses for why they could not bomb Auschwitz. They said they
could not fly a mission from England, as it was too far for fighter support.
Ironically, while the ovens at Auschwitz were running night and day, the United
States flew numerous bombing missions in the region, based out of Italy. The
United States even targeted the Farben facility next to Auschwitz, while giving
the excuse that they could not bomb Auschwitz. There is a photograph taken from
a bomber that dropped bombs on the Farben facility. In the photograph, the Auschwitz
facilities are directly below the plane as the bombs were dropping, aiming at
the Farben facilities.[98]
Some American bombs even landed on Auschwitz accidentally, killing nearly
a hundred inmates and guards. The United States helped about 150,000 Jews lose
their lives at Auschwitz while they refused to bomb the crematoria.

As
the death camps were opened at war's end, it could no longer be denied what the
Nazis had done. It stands as one of history's most evil mass murders. The Jewish
Holocaust was the culmination of a thousand years of anti-Semitism in Europe,
several hundred years of incessant European warfare, European greed and other
factors. The entire West had a hand in what happened. Blaming Hitler and the
Germans is convenient and makes them scapegoats, but they were merely the most
accomplished practitioners of anti-Semitism. They took the game to a new level.

Perhaps
the best documentary on the rise and fall of Hitler is the 1961 British production
Mein Kampf. It can be rented from video stores even today. It is an understated
account of those times, using German footage for nearly all of it. The introduction
of Mein Kampf states,

"This
account of Hitler's Hell on earth is dedicated in guilt to his victims. As human
beings we are responsible - for he was one of us and we permitted it to happen.

"May
we be wise enough and strong enough the prevent this from ever happening again!"

When Hitler's Mein Kampf was published
in the United States in the 1930s, it was sanitized, with his most vicious anti-Semitic
passages edited out. People such as FDR read the unedited version, but did not
publicize it.

At battle's end in Europe,
the death camps were opened and the surviving inmates staggered out. Not only
did the death camps, Einsatzgruppen and other actions consume more than five million
Jews, about a third of the world's Jews, but a million or more Gypsies also died
in the conflagration as well as other assorted unfortunates, such as Jehovah's
Witnesses. Four million Soviet soldiers died in the Nazi prison camps in Eastern Europe, their deaths
part of the Nazi's overall plan of death and destruction of "inferior"
people. After the world was cleansed of Jews and Gypsies, next on Hitler's list
was ridding Eastern Europe of the Slavs, clearing the land for settlement by Germans.
World War II was an insane orgy of violence that left about sixty million people
dead (or as many as 100 million), and as with all wars of the 20th
century, at least half of the deaths were civilian.[99] Millions more were displaced, and many millions
more lives were shattered. More than thirty million civilians died in World War
II. They were the most devastating few years in world history, as white people
fought over global control, with Japan joining the fray, killing at least ten
and perhaps fifteen million (with estimates as high as twenty million) Chinese
citizens during their brief but brutal rule. That was on top of the more than
twenty million who died a generation earlier in World War I, half of them civilians,
and another fifteen million or so who died in the Soviet Union's purges and general
Soviet repression. That is at least 100 million deaths in events that spanned
a generation. The devastation that Europe wreaked on the planet finally came
home to terrifying effect, in the final consequence of all militarism.

When the death camps were opened, the world
was shocked, but not that much. A few months later the United States dropped
atom bombs on Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo by the United States and its allies in early
1945 was merely a sign of the times. One Nazi strategy during the Jewish Holocaust
was reducing the Jews to what appeared a subhuman state, to further justify their
extermination. The people who designed the programs, such as Himmler, were diabolically
sane. Forcing the Jews into ghettos where they starved to death in squalor was
part of a plan to reduce them to their lowest state. The dignity with which many
Jews faced their extermination was inspiring.

Genocide
researchers such as David Stannard, Ward Churchill and Robert Jay Lifton have
commented regarding the high emotional toll that such research takes. The denied
darkness is a big reason why the West is so sick. Turning Columbus,
Washington, Custer,
Serra, Bush and the
rest of that mass murdering rogues gallery into heroes indicates a people that
cannot face their darkness, and are consequently doomed to keep recreating the
same disasters over and over.

Those
who survived the death camps had deep physical, emotional, and mental trauma.
The numerous survivor accounts attest to the immense psychological burden they
endured. Not every concentration camp was an outright extermination camp, and
children grew up in some of them. Of all the Jewish Holocaust accounts I have
read and watched over the years, one in particular has haunted me. It is not
a heart-wrenching tale of horror and survival, but regarding the psychological
responses that attended the camp experience. Werner Weinberg was interned at
Bergen-Belsen for fifteen months in 1944-1945. Weinberg wrote that life there
did not become the hell it became infamous for until the war’s last few months,
when the supply lines were cut and the Nazis fled the Eastern Front before the
Soviet armies. The huge influx of prisoners from the East, coinciding with cutting
the supply lines, turned Bergen-Belsen into a living hell. Yet, it still was
not an extermination camp, as such. Weinberg wrote that there was a code of ethics
of sorts, such as the prisoners frowning on cannibalism.

One
day when Weinberg was on a work detail that transported a cart across the camp,
acting as the horses that normally drew the cart. Dying inmates lay everywhere
in those final days. The Nazis called them musselmen. Musselmen
lost so much weight that they became human skeletons and lost all semblance of
sentience, lying in the mud, waiting to die. Dying musselmen were obstacles
for the cart, and the crew had to stop the cart and move the musselmen
(alive or dead) out of the way. One of Weinberg's crew had recently been transferred
from Auschwitz, and was disgusted with the spectacle of musselmen littering
the camp, blocking the progress of their cart. The inmate from Auschwitz boasted,
"No musselmen in Auschwitz! They were the first to go up the chimney!"
Weinberg was speechless. He was impressed by the new inmate's observation, and
felt shame that Bergen-Belsen could not match the cleanly efficiency of Auschwitz.[100]

Anti-Semitism
in America increased after the camps were opened, as measured by the poll
that showed American anti-Semitism peaking in 1946.[101] Even in September of 1945, after the world knew
of the death camps, 22% of American soldiers thought that the Nazi treatment of
Jews was justified, and another 10% were not sure.[102]
Arno Mayer, an officer in the war, was handed a note that stated, "When we
finish with the Germans and the Japs, we'll come back and kill the Jews and the
blacks."[103]
More Japanese than Germans were executed following the war crimes trials.

In
Europe, anti-Semitism did not abate with opening the camps. The wretches that
walked out of the camps often elicited disgust more than pity. General Patton
stated that the camp survivors in his care were a "subhuman species without
any of the cultural or social refinements of our time." He said that no
ordinary people "could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached
in the short space of four years."[104]
Jews newly freed from the camps begged to not be sent to where they lived before
the Jewish Holocaust. As American soldiers herded Jews onto trains bound for
Poland, men would fall to their knees, yelling, "Kill me now! You might
just as well kill me now, I am dead anyway if I go back to Poland." They
were right in many cases. The last half of 1945 saw many anti-Jew riots in Poland,
and there were 350 anti-Semitic murders in Poland during those months after the
war.[105]

Those post-war attitudes had a major bearing
on the establishment of Israel. The Jews had their Promised Land tradition, going
back millennia. Before the Holocaust, there was a marked difference of opinion
in the Jewish population about having a Jewish state, a concept known as Zionism.
After the Holocaust, the need for a Jewish state was obvious to all surviving
Jews, and Israel was founded. Unfortunately, their Promised Land became more
of a refuge from a world that hated them. If not for the Christian/European hatred
of Jews, today's state of affairs in Israel would
probably not exist. The Jews established a state right on top of Arabs that had
lived there, in relative harmony with Jews, for thousands of years. The Jews
did not enjoy peace and plenty throughout the Islamic world. Jewish/Islamic relations
deteriorated over the centuries, and the situation in Northern Africa was quite
bad, with massacres from time to time. There were anti-Jewish riots in the 1940s
in Islamic nations, which killed about a thousand Jews. Yet, the Palestinians
who had lived in Palestine for two thousand years suddenly were expelled by the
creation of a Jewish state right on top of them. The establishment of Israel
was a crime, no matter if the United Nations was behind it. To Jewish credit,
many have debated the establishment of a Jewish state. The issue of state versus
human rights has been at the center of Jewish life since Moses.

Today,
Israel has a nuclear arsenal with hundreds of nuclear warheads, with about a hundred
missiles aimed at Arab cities. Israel’s craziness and paranoia can be partly
attributed to centuries of persecution, with the Jewish Holocaust topping it off.
Many Arabs saw the establishment of the Jewish state as more of an outpost of
Western imperialism than a refuge from Western anti-Semitism. Einstein had the
right idea when he remarked that a Jewish state should be established in an atmosphere
of peace and friendship with the Arabs. That did not happen. Neither party was
amenable to negotiation, and the British helped bungle things, partly by inventing
the position of Grand Mufti for Jerusalem, then appointing a militant Arab to
the post.[106]The insanity of World War II affected both Jews and Arabs.
Menachem Begin was a bona fide terrorist, with his
Irgun terrorist group blowing up a hotel, killing many people. Stern Gang, another
Jewish terrorist group, even sought collaboration with the Nazis, offering to
fight alongside the Nazis, proposing that the Jews having a racist empire in the
Middle East, while Germany had one in Europe.[107] Yitzhak Shamir, the future
Prime Minister of Israel, ran Stern Gang after Avraham Stern was killed, and Shamir
never renounced Stern Gang’s support of Hitler. The peaceful Jews of Europe had
largely been herded into the death camps, their loss incalculable. Their peaceful
and accommodating collective voice may have made the situation in Israel today
a very different one.

Although opening
the death camps was somewhat shocking to American sensibilities, the steep fall
in anti-Semitism in America between 1946 and 1950 had more to do with other factors
than a twinge of conscience over America's hand in the Jewish Holocaust. Racism
and bigotry in America was deeply ingrained. The death camps showed how low humanity
could stoop in its hatred. War crimes trials began in late 1945. America assumed
a self-righteous posture regarding the Nuremberg trials, calling what the Nazis
did an unparalleled crime. The United States was in a curious position. The
war crimes trials were definitely a winners’ court. The United States had completed
the "ethnic cleansing" of its land
of natives only a few generations earlier. During World War II, black Americans
in the military were often treated abominably. Having its face rubbed in racism
and bigotry, seeing the extremes that Hitler and his chums could take the game,
led to American introspection, and returning American soldiers' major goal for
their nation was wiping out racial and religious bigotry. Native
Americans during those days were subject to varying conditions, with
the 1934 Wheeler-Howard Act giving them their first light at the end of the tunnel,
to only be undermined after the war was over, to intensify in the 1950s. It was
not until the 1970s that Native American activism, on the tail of the civil rights
days of the 60s, began significantly improving their plight.[108]

The
arrival of the white man in the Western Hemisphere spelled the annihilation of
native tribes, and even after they were reduced to tiny remnants of their original
population, "humanitarians" such as U.S. Senator Henry
Dawes proposed laws that ended up further decimating the natives. The U.S.
government practiced involuntary and secret sterilization of native women, forced
native children to live in white-run boarding schools to "take the Indian
out of them," and other genocidal practices.[109] Even today, the life expectancies
of reservation Indians are at Third World rates. In 1980, the life expectancy
of a reservation man was 44.6 years, and a few years higher for reservation women.[110] That is an
extraordinary number, among the lowest on earth. A nearly thirty-year disparity
between two population groups, reservation natives and the general U.S. population,
is something not found outside of death camp scenarios.

It
is not widely known, but the African slave trade deposited relatively few Africans
to North America, less than five percent of the total that came from Africa.
That was because the United States was nearly alone in being able to successfully
breed slaves. The main determinant was that life expectancy in the United States
was among the highest in the world, significantly higher than Europe's. Slaves
tended to have life expectancies that paralleled those of the free population,
provided they were not considered "expendable," as the Taino
were to the Spaniards. A longer life expectancy among American slaves meant that
slave women could have longer and more productive breeding careers (and their
masters were more than happy to inseminate them for as long as they could bear
children), and therefore America could breed its own slaves, not being as dependent
on slave imports as its southern neighbors were. There were other reasons peculiar
to the United States' growing slave population, but a longer life expectancy was
critical. When the slave trade was outlawed by the civilized nations, one salient
reason the United States did not object was that it could keep breeding slaves
indefinitely, and they made a legal distinction between Africans who were enslaved
in their lifetimes, and Americans who were born into slavery. In 1980, with a
nearly thirty-year life expectancy disparity between reservation Indians and the
white U.S. population, black life expectancy was "only" 5.6 years behind
white life expectancy.[111]

The
United States had a challenging time being self-righteous regarding the Nazi activities,
especially when it eagerly hired death camp Nazis in programs
such as Operation Paperclip. Comparisons of the Nazi death camps to the California
Mission system began as early as 1946, when the
Nuremberg trials were still being held. World War II’s aftermath can be seen
as a major event in improving race and ethnic relations in the United States.
The struggle was long and hard, but Jews, Native Americans, blacks and other historically
disenfranchised groups began making gains after World War II. The Truman administration
created numerous commissions that discovered widespread racism and bigotry in
America, and made recommendations to end it. The armed forces were officially
desegregated in 1948. Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Dodgers in 1947,
winning the very first Rookie of the Year Award, an award that was generously
handed out to black players for the next decade. Frank Sinatra starred in The
House I Live in in 1945, which pled for racial and religious tolerance, followed
by other movies soon after, which made the same plea, particularly regarding anti-Semitism.
Those were precursors to the modern Civil Rights era that largely began in 1954
when the Supreme court struck down legal segregation with the Brown vs. Board
of Education ruling, and in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to sit on the back
of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

The
progress was a mixed bag. Much of the progress of the late 1940s was set back
by the McCarthy years in the early 1950s, and the assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr. coincided with the end of black economic progress in America. As a
ratio to white income, black income increased dramatically from 1940 to 1969,
nearly doubling. It has remained stagnant, stuck at around 60%, lower than even
the Hispanic income.[112] Down there
with the blacks and Hispanics are the natives, probably at the bottom of the barrel.[113]
The Sioux reservation on Pine Ridge, site of the Wounded
Knee massacre, is in the poorest county in America today.

Native
Americans were still subject to Cowboys-and-Indians stereotyping in the movie
industry. One remarkable comparison of the recent progress is the two receptions
given by the Academy Award audience, a generation apart, when a Native American
woman took the stage. When Marlon Brando refused his Oscar for his portrayal
of Don Corleone in The Godfather, and had a Native American woman read
a short speech from Brando, and gave his reason for rejecting the Oscar being
the movie industry's horrid depiction of Native Americans, the crowd booed the
woman off the stage. Contrast that reaction and its reason to the reception granted
a Native American women who took the stage with Kevin Costner when he accepted
the Oscar for best picture for Dances with Wolves, less than twenty years
after The Godfather won best picture. The woman was given a standing ovation.[114]

In World War II's aftermath, the newly formed
United Nations actively tried preventing genocidal holocausts from happening again,
and the newly coined term "genocide" was the subject of the Genocide
Convention. The resolution that emerged from the convention was unanimously adopted
by the member states, and soon ratified by all the world's nations, almost. The
only significant exception to ratifying the Genocide Convention's resolution,
a resolution that was ratified to the extent that it became binding international
law in 1951, was the United States. To this day, the United States has not properly
ratified what all the civilized nations of the world rapidly ratified over fifty
years ago.[115] Why? Because to do so would
make a crime what the United States is still doing to native tribes, what it is
doing to Iraq today, what it did to Southeast Asia and Korea, what it supported in Central America, East Timor,
and so on.

The United States is the
world's leading practitioner of genocide, and signing on with the rest of the
world in denouncing genocide is contrary to the pursuit of our "national
interests."[116] In my lifetime, particularly
in recent years, the United States has been virtually the only "civilized"
nation in the world, and often the only one,
to fail to ratify international treaties to preserve the environment (such as
the Rio Summit or Basel Convention), outlawing children from becoming soldiers,
and so on. No European nation has a death penalty, and the United States is only
one of six nations that execute people for crimes committed while they were children.
Our august co-executioners are some of the world’s most brutal and anti-humanitarian
nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Nigeria. The United States executes
more children than all those nations put together, and also has the world's
largest prison population and highest incarceration rate.

Debunking the "Myths"

There
is plenty of myth-debunking happening regarding World War II, but many "myth-debunkers"
often seemed to be grinding axes, and can be establishment apologists pretending
to be myth-debunkers, acting as if they were bringing historical "balance"
or “clarity” to the situation, but merely bringing another kind of bias to the
table.[117]

David
Wyman wrote The Abandonment of the Jews, and is considered the pioneer
of historical investigation regarding America's reaction to the plight of Jews
in the 1930s and through the end of World War II. The thesis of Wyman and numerous
others is that the Western nations did almost nothing while the Jewish Holocaust
took shape and was carried out. Wyman's work sparked significant scholarly discussion.[118]
One response was The Myth of Rescue by William Rubinstein.

In
the first chapter, Rubinstein surveyed the phenomenon of recent scholarship on
the issue of "rescue." He surveyed the vast literature on the subject
that has been produced, and told the reader he will demonstrate that all the scholarship
that makes the case that the Western world could have done anything to
minimize the Holocaust is wrong. Rubinstein began his assault on the myths by
attacking the first one, the "Myth of Closed Doors, 1933-9." In that
chapter, Rubinstein made the case that anti-Semitism was not nearly as pronounced
in American society, and European society in general, as Wyman and others would
have us believe. Rubinstein devoted great attention to the notion. He presented
tables to show that contrary to the assertion of Wyman and friends, most of Germany’s
Jews escaped to Western nations before the war broke out, so the closed-door idea
is a myth. He presented several tables of numbers to make his case. He presented
tables on how many Jews fled Germany, when and where they went, and presented
results of public opinion polls on the issue of Jewish immigration and their attitude
toward the Nazi regime. With Rubinstein's book as the sole source of information,
his thesis might have been convincing. As with Julian Simon's
work, reading statistical data needs to be performed carefully, because creative
ability can make numbers say almost whatever people want them to, and there are
various ways to interpret them. What numbers an author presents and omits can
disclose a great deal regarding his/her motivation.

Rubinstein
set himself a strenuous task in attempting to puncture the "myths,"
and the most credible way is to simply present the data, or summarize it for the
reader, so that an "objective" assessment of the "myth" could
be made. Many times, Rubinstein criticized the "ahistorical" arguments
that he challenged. Rubinstein noted that Americans during the Great Depression
were averse to letting in immigrants, and "paradoxically" they detested
what was happening in Nazi Germany.[119] He presented
survey results that showed that on the eve of World War II, most Americans were
opposed to an active campaign against Jews in the United States.[120] Rubinstein’s
equation of American anti-Semitism and revulsion of what the Nazis were doing
in Germany was misleading.

Many people celebrated
those gruesome deeds, even universally at times, as in Denver when the conquering
heroes came back from Sand Creek. They proudly
showed off the severed genitalia of murdered women, wearing it on their hats,
while the Rocky Mountain News celebrated the events, writing that "Cheyenne
scalps are getting as thick as toads in Egypt…Everybody has got one and is anxious
to get another to send east."[121]
Yet, that did not mean that everybody in America thought it was great. The more
"civilized" folks back east, with the local natives long ago annihilated,
developed the rudiments of a conscience, and many were shocked at the Sand Creek
Massacre. That did not mean that they liked Indians, it just meant that when
their fellow citizens indiscriminately killed them, specifically targeting women
and children, their sensibilities were offended. Regarding Iraq today, most Americans prefer to not know
about the vast numbers of Iraqi people (largely children) that our policies are
killing. They avert their eyes, and our mainstream media
presents very few images of that carnage. That America has killed off more than
a million Iraqis since 1991 is not pretty, but most Americans, if faced with pictures
of starving Iraqi infants and pertinent scenes of our "diplomats" helping
to create those situations, would not cheer.

We
are still an intensely racist nation, but if somebody goes on the American airwaves
and calls black people "niggers," they have taken things too far, and
will be publicly upbraided. People can be racist and bigoted, but they cannot
say it too loudly, or like Rush Limbaugh does, couch it in "humor."
Several publicly visible careers have come to a screeching halt in America in
the past generation when somebody made a comment that could have been construed
as racist (Al Campanis of the Dodgers is one example, Jimmy the Greek another).
That such a display would be subject to merciless derision does not conflict with
the fact that those witnessing it are racist. It just means that some had the
poor taste to say it openly, which is not acceptable in our genteel society, and
the anger with which they are attacked is often an aspect of denial coming forward.
Ex-KKK Grand Wizard David Duke can even make a respectable showing in a gubernatorial
election; he just cannot say the word "nigger" in public.

For
instance, if George Bush or Bill Clinton called the Iraqi people "sand niggers"
during a press conference, they would have never heard the end of it, and something
like that could even create an atmosphere of impeachment. Yet, those two men
presided over the deaths of more than a million Iraqi citizens, about half of
them children. In America, killing a million people is no crime, something that
has barely registered on America's conscience yet, just like our devastation of
Southeast Asia and Central
America. Yet, calling those people a racist appellation would bring the American
people’s wrath. The major crime against humanity passes without mention, or even
justified by people such as Madeleine Albright. Call those murdered people
a nasty name however, and people invite the wrath of those responsible for the
murders.

Rubinstein made much of the
fact that Charles Lindbergh ended his political career with a 1941 speech that
outlined the threat that Jews posed to America. America acted self-righteously
in lambasting Lindbergh for speaking out. His crime was voicing his opinions.
How could it be otherwise, when Jews of the day were subject to discriminatory
hiring practices that excluded them from many professions? How could it be
otherwise, when they were denied admittance to many hotels, beaches and other
public places? How could it be otherwise, when more than half of America believed
that Jews should be segregated? Lindbergh was saintly compared to Henry Ford, whom Rubinstein did not mention. There was no widespread
boycott of Ford cars due to his attacks on Jews.

Similarly,
most Americans did not approve of newsreel footage and reports of Nazi barbarities
in the 1930s. It did not mean that most Americans did not have anti-Semitic sentiments.
It was just that openly burning books and beating Jews on the street was going
too far. Particularly disheartening was that in 1930s America, about six percent
of Americans openly approved of what the Nazis were doing. Rubinstein, however,
makes the case that only six percent openly approving of what the Nazis were doing,
while 94% disapproved, shows that American was not all that anti-Semitic. That
is a questionable analogy, and impressive data regarding American anti-Semitism
was completely ignored in The Myth of Rescue.

The
chapter was titled "The Myth of Closed Doors," because he made the case
that the doors were open. He presented statistics that supported his position
that anti-Semitism was not pronounced in America. Disapproval of the Nazi book
burnings and other barbaric acts provided little evidence for how muted anti-Semitism
may have been in America. What it gave evidence of was how many people would
approve of open and vicious anti-Semitism, and depressingly, six percent of Americans
openly approved of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.

That
would be as if Americans watched the documentary The Panama Deception and approved of what America
did to Panama. It is highly unlikely that even one percent of Americans could
watch that documentary and wave the flag over the American invasion of Panama.
If it was Italians invading Panama in that documentary, for instance, probably
not one American in ten thousand would cheer what happened, and call the Italians
unparalleled barbarians. Six percent of Americans openly approved of what the
Nazis were doing in the 1930s, and is shockingly high (six percent "strongly"
approved for America to begin a similar program, while another six percent "mildly"
approved of such plans). Anti-Semitism had to be quite high for people to openly
approve such barbarity.

Rubinstein
wrote that the data plainly showed that barriers to Jews fleeing Germany after
Kristallnacht came down in the "democracies" once it became very
apparent what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.[122] He tellingly left out facts
that would have painted a fuller picture.

The
issue is: "Did the 'democracies' let in Jews in numbers great enough to help
minimize the Holocaust?" More importantly, what were the intentions of the
"democracies" on the eve of war? Did they do all they could, but it
was not enough? Also, did they do very little, and if so, how much was due to
anti-Semitism and other biases? Those are the important questions that Wyman
and others bring up, and are the crux of the matter. Rubinstein continually tried
to demonstrate that whatever good intentions the "democracies" may have
had, all attempts to act on them would have been uniformly futile.

Rubinstein
showed that most German Jews fled Germany before World War II started, more than
80% of Jews under forty years old.[123] That is true. What Rubinstein
failed to mention was that those fleeing Jews often did not get where they wanted
to, but accepted wherever would take them. For instance, France accepted German-Jew
refugees rather readily, until 1938, when it began tightening the screws, as everybody
else did, which was contrary to Rubinstein's assertion. Rubinstein mentioned
that fact, but then tried mitigating it by showing that there were between 40,000
and 60,000 Jews in France when war broke out.[124] What Rubinstein failed to mention
was that many if not most were trying to go elsewhere, particularly America.
That situation existed for all the peripheral nations that took in Jews on the
eve of war. America, however, was erecting what Wyman called "paper walls."
The world’s largest Jewish population was in the United States, and Jews were
treated better in the United States than anywhere else in the West. After Kristallnacht,
the situation of Jews in Germany became increasingly desperate, and the "democracies"
moved to limit immigration, not open their doors further. For all the statistical
analysis Rubinstein engaged in, he could not obscure that fact, and ignored or
minimized events that clearly spelled it out.

Probably
the signal event that demonstrated America's attitude toward German Jews fleeing
Germany was the fate of the Wagner-Rogers bill, introduced in early 1939. It
would have allowed a special allotment of Jewish children into the United States,
children who had fled the Third Reich. Those children had been separated from
their parents and smuggled out of Germany and Austria. Opposition to the bill
was widespread and vociferous in America, even though America's newspapers nearly
all took the editorial stance of supporting the bill.[125] President Roosevelt's
cousin even stated that 20,000 charming children would all too soon grow to be
"20,000 ugly adults." Roosevelt bowed before the public outpouring
of sentiment, and let the bill die quietly, taking no action.[126] That was the salient and pertinent opinion poll
of the day, and Rubinstein did not mention it. Faced with an unavoidable decision
to take in Jewish refugee children, America slammed the door. The next year,
legislation to take in English children refugees passed with enthusiasm.

The other event, on the
eve of war, after Kristallnacht, was barely mentioned by Rubinstein, and
he used it to criticize critics of the West's role in the Jewish Holocaust. The
horrific voyage of the Saint Louis is a monument to the West's attitude
toward the Jewish plight on the eve of war. It was an acid test of the West's
attitude, but Rubinstein kept throwing numbers at the reader, diverting their
attention from the entrenched anti-Semitism that pervaded the West at that time.

The Saint Louis' voyage is also an example
of the hazards of relying on secondary historical accounts. In Yahil's The
Holocaust, she wrote that not all the passengers aboard the Saint Louis
were taken in and some sailed back to Hamburg.[127]
For years, I believed that was the case. While researching this essay, I saw
other scholars say that all the passengers were taken in by the nations
of Britain, Holland, Belgium and France. In order to resolve the discrepancy,
I had to dig up an authoritative work on the Saint Louis' voyage, and obtained
Voyage of the Damned by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, and I found
that those nations indeed took in all passengers. Yahil's account was wrong,
and for years, I was misled. That is the hazard of relying on secondary history.
In my work, I usually do not make historical assertions, especially when relying
on secondary history, unless I see a number of sources agree on the events. The
fact that all the passengers were taken in instead of some sailing to Hamburg
is significant. It does say something about the Allies. Yet, reading the voyage’s
account is sobering. In the United States, news accounts and editorials in American
newspapers ran while the ship was stranded in Havana harbor. The Cubans were
derided by numerous American papers for not letting them in, and the Christian
Science Monitor castigated the passengers of the Saint Louis for being
so selective about their destination, invoking the image of pioneers carving their
homes out of the wilderness, and reminding the Jews to consider that option.[128]

The
Christian Science Monitor conveniently ignored that Jews had been doing
exactly that in Palestine, and that there was not another option like that
in the world, and by that time Palestine had been closed off as a destination
by British restrictions. In 1939, on the eve of war, Jews fleeing Germany comprised
more than half of all immigration to Palestine, the highest proportion of any
pre-War year, but the number of Jews immigrating to Palestine from Germany in
1939, 8500, was less than immigrated each year from 1934-1936. The British clamped
down on immigration after anti-Jewish riots by Palestinian Arabs in 1936. Britain's
relative openness to Jewish immigration was partly due to the fact that they did
not want them immigrating to Palestine, another point glossed over by Rubinstein.
However, Rubinstein does score some points when he pointed out that many German
Jews did not go to Palestine when they may have been able to. There is truth
to that, which partly had to do with the anti-Zionist element in Jewish circles.
Not everybody wanted to go to the Promised Land. When the Saint Louis
sailed, however, Palestine apparently was not an option.

Another
unmentioned event did serious damage to Rubinstein's thesis, which was the voyage
of the SS Struma. In December 1941, the ship was filled with 769 Romanian
Jews at port in Istanbul. The ship was not seaworthy, but those Jews were desperately
fleeing to wherever they could. Turkey was another "neutral" power
during World War II. The ship lay in Istanbul's harbor for more than two months,
and the British denied them permission to continue to Palestine. On February
24, 1942, the Turkish government ordered the ship to leave and the Struma
was towed out into the Black Sea, where a Russian submarine sunk it by torpedo,
apparently by accident. Two people survived that sinking. Raul Hilberg wrote
of the incident, "The Balkan area had a large Jewish population, and henceforth
the Turkish government needed no confirmation of Britain's policy to frustrate
the immigration of these Jews to Palestine."[129]

The
detailed account of the Saint Louis' voyage is a searing reflection on
the United States and the West. One of the Saint Louis passengers, Aaron
Pozner, was a stowaway who had been incredibly kicked out of Dachau with a small
group of men who were told that they could leave Dachau if they left Germany in
two weeks. Pozner made his way to Hamburg and hid in a stack of curing animal
hides on the waterfront, enduring that awesome stench. Pozner saw prisoners regularly
executed in Dachau by fiendish methods. One guard specialized in castration by
bayonet. Hiding in curing hides was a minor inconvenience compared to the rigors
of Dachau. Other Saint Louis passengers were beaten by gangs of SS soldiers
on their way to the boat.

Yahil's account
was not as wrong as it first appeared. When the Saint Louis had the door
slammed in its face in Havana, its sister ship the Orinoco was sailing
from Hamburg with 200 Jewish refugees, following the Saint Louis' example.
Seeing what happened to the Saint Louis, the Orinocodid
return to Hamburg. The only intervention the West apparently took regarding the
Orinoco's voyage was taken by the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Joe Kennedy,
who informally warned Hitler to refrain from seizing those passengers when they
disembarked in Hamburg and throwing them into concentration camps. The Germans
apparently took Kennedy’s threat seriously, because those hapless Orinoco passengers
went home unmolested…although they likely ended up in concentration camps before
it was all over.[130]
Britain and France flatly rejected taking in the passengers of the Orinoco.

The Saint Louis' plight was so dire,
with the situation of finding no safe harbor, that those aboard made several suicide
attempts, by poisoning, slashing their wrists, jumping overboard and hanging themselves.
A few attempts were successful, and there was genuine fear that the passengers
would stage a Masada-like mass suicide, so there was a constant suicide watch
on deck. While that was going on, there were desperate negotiations taking place
to get some nation to take them in. In the Western Hemisphere, there were a few
offers of dubious nature, by the Dominican Republic, Honduras and the Panama Canal
Zone. There was a great deal of lobbying in the United States by Jewish groups,
but America slammed the door hard, although many passengers had U.S. quota numbers.
When the Saint Louis set sail for Europe, it sailed up the Florida coast,
in sight of Miami. A U.S. Coast Guard ship escorted the Saint Louis as
it sailed along the American coast. Why did it escort the Saint Louis?
The fear was that Jews would jump ship and try swimming to America's shores.
The Coast Guard was under orders to look for Jews jumping overboard, capturing
them and redepositing them back aboard the Saint Louis.

When
those four European nations were finally persuaded to take in the refugees, only
after being paid about $500,000 by Jewish groups, they nearly battled each other
in getting the passengers with the lowest quota numbers for the United States,
so they could quickly get rid of them. Holland interned the Jews with other Jews
who were trying the flee Europe, made clear that their asylum was only temporary,
and they refused any passenger who did not have a U.S. quota number. The internment
camp in Holland was surrounded by barbed wire and was watched by guard dogs.
The passengers who disembarked in Belgium were viewed with great distrust, and
essentially treated like prisoners. France welcomed the Jews relatively graciously,
yet were in almost open contest with Britain to take in Jews with the lowest U.S.
quota numbers. When the final stop was made in England, about sixty of the men
were immediately interned in a camp of about 5000 Jews, all hoping to go somewhere,
anywhere, that would take them.

The Saint
Louis Jews who went to Belgium, Holland and France mostly ended up in death
camps before it was all over. If America had taken them in, they would have survived.
The voyage of the Saint Louis alone renders highly dubious Rubinstein's
"myth of closed doors" argument. The ill-fated Wagner-Rogers bill,
that Rubinstein did not mention, deals his arguments a fatal blow.

To
gain a fleshed out understanding of the situation, watch the documentary America
and the Holocaust; Deceit and Indifference. It features the real story of
Kurt Klein and his parents. As with many German Jews, the Klein family first
got their children out of the country, then planned to follow them when they could.
After Kristallnacht in November of 1938, the Klein parents were in the
long line of Jews trying to escape to America. In December of 1938, the Kleins
were part of a horde of Jews besieging the American consulate in Stuttgart. They
were in line to get out of Germany and into America, but were informed that there
were over 22,000 cases ahead of them. The waiting list was more than two years
long.

In August 1940, after nearly
two years of waiting, the Stuttgart consulate revoked the Klein's tentative approval
for immigration. Soon after the American consulate in Stuttgart slammed the doors
in their faces, they were deported by Germany to Vichy France, and took up the
immigration issue anew with the American consulate in Marseilles. Vichy France
was not occupied by the Nazis, but collaborated with them. The Kleins were kicked
out of Germany, not put into concentration camps. The Kleins lived in an
abysmal refugee detention camp, given starvation rations, and desperately sought
a way to America. By that time, the American State Department
was acting very consciously to limit Jewish immigration to America. That
was when the "paper walls" escalated and eventually cut off almost all
Jewish refugees from coming to America. That situation was a primary issue that
Wyman investigated.

In July of 1941,
nearly two years into World War II, the American consulate again informed
the Kleins that all their previous efforts to immigrate were for naught, and that
they would have to start over. The Kleins were also forced to live apart in the
refugee camp. In December of 1941, a few days before the Japanese bombed Pearl
Harbor, the Kleins had their last glimpse of freedom. Their children had been
able to book them passage to America. All was in readiness, except for approval
from the American consulate. The consulate informed the Kleins that the quota
for German immigrants had been exceeded, and that they would have to wait for
the quota to open up to admit them. By that time, the Final Solution was underway
in Eastern Europe, with the Einsatzgruppen performing their mass executions in
the newly conquered territory, as Germany invaded Eastern Europe during the double-cross
of Stalin.

After the final failed attempt
in December 1941, after three years of desperate attempts to gain entry
to the United States, the Klein children stopped hearing from their parents.
Their mail to their parents was eventually returned to them undeliverable, and
after the war it became known that the Klein parents were sent to Auschwitz in
August of 1942.

That can disparagingly
be called an "anecdote," although a heart-wrenching one. About 100,000
Jews in peripheral nations to Germany were in the same situation as the Kleins
were. How many Jews saw the impossibly long waiting line into America, and did
not even try? In his debunking of the "myth of closed doors," Rubinstein
puts in several anecdotes, but of a very different nature. His anecdotes are
all about how nobody thought the Jewish Holocaust would happen, which was why
many German Jews did not emigrate when they had the chance. His anecdotes were
about how much everybody hated Nazi Germany. Again, hating Nazis did not mean
that they loved Jews.

The 1936 Olympics
were staged in Berlin, and there was little outrage over it. America participated
in it, Jesse Owens became a legend, and the Olympics were a huge propaganda coup
for Germany, as the American press generally wrote glowing accounts about Nazi
Germany. The Jewish issue was nearly invisible in the American press during the
Olympic coverage. Although Jewish and other groups tried to organize a boycott
of the Berlin Olympics, one never happened, and prominent Olympic officials such
as Avery Brundage even spoke out against the Jewish-led attempts to form a boycott.
America did not enter the war until the Japanese were egged into bombing
Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on America, when the European
war was more than two years old.

The
single most respected work of scholarship on American anti-Semitism is Leonard
Dinnerstein's Anti-Semitism in America, published in 1994, three years
before The Myth of Rescue appeared. Anti-Semitism in America is
considered the first comprehensive treatment of American anti-Semitism's history.
Rubinstein's treatment of Dinnerstein's work reminded me of the JFK assassination
debunking by Gerald Posner, where the appearance
of dealing with the all the pertinent evidence was feigned. Posner would dismiss
entire bodies of work with footnotes, while plowing to his foregone conclusion
that Oswald was a lone nut who was murdered by another lone nut. The only mention
of Anti-Semitism in America in Rubinstein's book was in a footnote, where
he dismissed Dinnerstein's work as being unbalanced and failing to note how much
Americans were opposed to the Nazis. Rubinstein tried linking shock and disgust
with what the Nazis were doing with love for the Jews (literally, "philo-Semitism").[131]

Another
book cripples Rubinstein's "open doors" thesis. Mitchell Bard's harrowing
Forgotten Victims is the story of Americans who ended up in the
death camps. As with stories like it, denial has been the prominent American
reaction to the plight of American citizens, many not even Jewish, who ended up
in the death camps, including American soldiers. Bard's work is the first to
try summarizing the experience of Americans in the Final Solution. Bard remarked
on the paucity of documentation on the subject, as he sifted through archives,
hunting down and interviewing survivors.

As
can be seen in many other war accounts, Bard shows how the Red Cross had a hand
in the Jewish Holocaust, as it accepted at face value the Nazi explanations for
why Jewish prisoners were segregated from the general prison populations, and
never really spoke out about the holocaust that was obvious to its people in the
field, visiting the concentration camps. The official explanation was that they
were afraid to jeopardize access to the camps if they spoke out. The head of
the Red Cross even used the term "the Jewish Problem," the phrase the
Nazis used.[132]

The
Red Cross' timid silence and acquiescence is another dark chapter of the Jewish
Holocaust. The aspect of Bard's book which further eradicates Rubinstein's "open
doors" thesis is recording how the United States prevented fleeing Americans
from coming back from Europe. In 1939, about 80,000 Americans were living abroad,
tens of thousands in Europe. On November 25, 1939, only a few months into World
War II, the assistant Secretary of State, George Messersmith, wrote that Americans
living abroad who were not planning on returning could not expect any help from
the U.S. government if they became ensnared in war zones. Messersmith wrote,

"Their real status does not differ
very much from that of the many thousands of unfortunate persons deserving of
our sympathy, and having no claim to American citizenship, who would desire to
come to this country in order to escape from danger zones or for other reasons
and who seek immigration visas and passport visas to that end…This government
considers that by reason of having already met this particular responsibility,
no situation should arise, even if conditions should become more aggravated in
certain places, that would warrant it in providing further special facilities
to enable Americans to return to this country."[133]

Bard wrote that Messersmith's attitude
"would condemn hundreds of Americans to death." The Germans regarded
any Jew, regardless of their nationality, as fair game. When the Germans began
requiring American Jews to register in occupied France, William Leahy, the ambassador
to France at the time, protested, and the Germans stated that it was required
to "ensure the recovery of the country." America apparently did nothing.
Americans caught in German-occupied Europe were often given special consideration,
while America was officially neutral. In January of 1941, American Jews in Hungary
became subject to new anti-Jewish laws. The American government was again virtually
inert.

When America closed German consulates
in America in the summer of 1941, the Germans retaliated by closing American consulates
in occupied territory. American business was conducted through the Swiss Legation
after that. When Jewish property was seized in Hungary, the State department
specifically did not support the claims of Jews living in America if they had
not yet earned American citizenship.[134]

When
Americans began getting rounded up in Romania, and Cordell Hull, the Secretary
of State, was informed of the Final Solution being carried out in Romania, with
Americans being deported to Eastern Europe, where their fate was uncertain (we
know today that it was pretty certain), Hull responded like the bureaucrat he
was, and allowed some small deviation from policy to provide passports to American-Jews
who were in threat of being rounded up with the other Jews. Nothing was suggested
for helping the non-American Jews.[135]

In the day’s correspondence, the State Department’s
attitude was clear. Cavendish Cannon, of the State Department's Division of European
Affairs, objected to the plan to rescue Jews from Romania because it would encourage
other persecuted people to seek refuge in the United States. Many in the State
Department, who thought that rescuing Jews would pose a danger or “take the burden
or the curse off Hitler”, held Cannon’s attitude.[136]

Breckenridge
Long, a prominent villain in the Jewish plight and America's response to it, proposed
to not only restrict immigration to America by refugees, but also for American
citizens, citing that they could really be spies and subversives, keeping
in line with the "Fifth Column" fears of the day, which were exaggerated.
Long even wrote that not all Americans wanting to come home would be allowed in,
stating that, "only those we want should be accepted."[137]
If Long felt that way about American citizens who wanted to come back to
America, what chance did Jews of European citizenship have? That situation prodded
David Wyman into writing The Abandonment of the Jews.

In
January 1943, the U.S. government discovered that American Jews in France were
being treated just like other Jews in France, and our government gave a tepid
response that the Germans had better watch out, or Germans in American hands might
suffer. In September 1944, 30,000 Americans were still in Europe. American Jews
in the internment camps were treated worse than the others, and Americans began
ending up in concentration camps.

Bard
relates the tale of Barry Spanjaard. Spanjaard was only ten years old in 1940.
He was born in America, but his parents were Dutch. The American consul told
Barry to return to America and leave his parents behind in Europe. Given that
choice, Barry stayed with his parents. Spanjaard had his birth certificate, but
not a U.S. passport. Because he did not have a passport, the Germans deported
him and his parents to Bergen-Belsen, where they spent the next year. In January
of 1945, the Germans let Barry and his parents go free. Barry carried out his
father, who weighed sixty-five pounds by that time. They headed for Switzerland,
but his father died a few days later. Years later, Barry learned that the Germans
had tried to trade him to America for a German, and our government refused. Barry
later fought in the Korean War, and when he found out about how his government
refused to trade for him, he said that he would have never gone in the American
military to fight "for this country" if he knew that then. Barry witnessed
his father being beaten and other horrors. As an American, he had a somewhat
privileged status at Bergen-Belsen: he was not forced to beat his inmates, as
other boys were.[138]

Bard
believes that hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans would have had their lives
spared if our government had done anything substantial about it, instead of erecting
"paper walls" for American citizens. In one instance, the American
government demanded that an intern at Auschwitz produce proof of citizenship before
they would help. Those stonewalling behaviors condemned many Americans to death
in the camps.[139]

Ancillary
to the point of demonstrating how untenable Rubinstein's "open doors"
thesis is, below is some more of Bard's devastating book. American citizens ended
up in the Warsaw ghetto, and Bard recounts the story of Mary Berg, an American
teenager who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto for more than two years. Berg wrote a
diary that is a much different account than Anne Frank's. Frank hid in a house
in Holland. Berg walked the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto daily, witnessing the
death and suffering that surrounded her.

Jewish-American
soldiers wore dog tags with an "H" on it, identifying their religion
as Hebrew. The "H" was officially so their spiritual rites could be
ministered properly. The problem was, however, that a Jewish-American solider
could go his entire tour of duty and never see a rabbi. The "H" became
a bull's-eye for Jewish-American soldiers who had been captured by the Germans.
Their buddies often tried hiding them by swapping dog tags, giving them their
Bibles, and the like.

American soldiers
ended up at Buchenwald and Mauthausen. Perhaps three hundred American soldiers
went to Buchenwald. Most lived to tell about it, but many also died. Most were
not Jewish. Many ended up at Mauthausen, which was perhaps worse than Auschwitz.
Mauthausen was where the Nazis engaged in the infamous practice of forcing the
prisoners to haul stones. Prisoners were forced to carry huge stones up the 148
steps of the quarry, then rush back down to haul another one back up, over and
over, until they died. American soldiers were forced into that duty. The Nazis
would execute their collapsed rock-haulers on the spot, including American soldiers.
Bard gives an example of one day, September 5, 1944, when Dutch, English and American
POWs arrived at Mauthausen. They spent the first day getting baths and being
assigned barracks. The next day they carried stones all day long, and then were
all shot, the same day.[140] American soldiers would die by beating and torture
during interrogation, their bodies being fed to the crematorium.

OSS
(Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA) Lieutenant
Jack Taylor ran numerous special American missions behind enemy lines, but was
finally captured and ended up at Mauthausen. Taylor was slated for execution,
but was assigned to a work detail to build a crematorium. Taylor endured unimaginable
horror, with fellow prisoners resorting to cannibalism. Because he was an American,
other prisoners used him as a repository so he could tell the stories of what
happened, as he had a better chance of surviving than they did. He was told of
human experiments and executions by every means imaginable, such as being shot,
gassed, hanged, beaten with sticks, hammers, pickaxes and shovels; being torn
apart by dogs, forced off of cliffs, injected with chemicals in human experiments,
drowned, crushed in cement mixers, buried alive, eyes gouged out, red hot pokers
shoved down their throats, etc. Taylor saw enough himself that nothing they could
say amazed him.

Human experiments were
routinely carried out, and prisoners with unusual features were killed and their
unusual features preserved, such as tattoos, strange lesions and deformities.
A doctor told Taylor that "A hunchback and a dwarf, who had come to the notice
of one of the SS doctors, were executed and their skeletons cleaned and mounted
for specimens."[141]

Taylor
survived Mauthausen and was freed when the camp was liberated. He is a prominent
witness, and Mauthausen was not even an extermination camp. Testimony like Taylor's
is difficult for Holocaust deniers to tear apart as Jewish propaganda, especially
American-flag-waving Holocaust deniers.

Bard
spends more of his book on a group of American prisoners who had it probably worse
than any other group of American POWs in Europe. In late 1944, the Germans made
their last desperate offensive, known as the Battle of the Bulge. They took the
American troops by surprise and captured thousands of American troops. They slaughtered
many American prisoners at what became known as the Malmédy Massacre, where the
SS again demonstrated their heroic penchant for executing unarmed prisoners.
The Nazis tried separating the Jewish-American soldiers from the four thousand
soldiers they captured. Again, their buddies tried hiding them, but with threats
the Nazis were able to get 130 Jewish-American soldiers to identify themselves.
They took those 130 soldiers, added 220 other soldiers from the ranks, and sent
them off by train to Berga, a camp that would have the highest mortality rate
of any POW camp during the war. Berga was a slave labor camp, where the soldiers
were forced into mining activities. They were starved and worked to death for
fifty days, then the Allied armies drew close and the survivors were sent on a
death march, just as Jews were being marched around the countryside in those last
days. When their guards finally abandoned them, U.S. soldiers, who could not
believe at first that those human skeletons were American soldiers, discovered
them. More than 70 of those 350 soldiers died in the span of two months. They
had been reduced to the same "subhuman" condition that Patton said the
Jews in the concentration camps had been reduced to.[142] While in their
ghastly prison conditions, the esprit de corps deteriorated a little, and stealing
from each other was what most soldiers did, as their survival partly depended
on it. They always wore all their clothes, because they would disappear if they
took them off. One soldier awoke to find a buddy trying to take his boots off
his feet while he slept.

America's response
to Berga was typical: denial. The army went so far as to send one survivor to
a psychiatrist, saying that he had to be making up his story of Berga. When a
soldier who survived Buchenwald applied for assistance at a VA hospital, the doctor
who interviewed him wrote in his record, "Claims he was in Buchenwald."
Another Buchenwald survivor was told by the Air Force Records Center that there
was no record of him being a POW. When he wrote to federal agencies, their reply
was invariably: "There were no Allied airmen at Buchenwald." The government
made returning POWs sign secrecy agreements, further paving the way to burying
their story. To this day, the U.S. government is trying to cover up what happened.
Until recently, the survivors of the other four thousand Battle of the Bulge POWs
who remained after the 350 prisoners were separated and sent to Berga, knew nothing
about where those 350 soldiers went, or their fate. The survivors often have
their experiences received with disbelief when they bring them up, so they keep
silent.

The two fiends who ran the camp
at Berga were prosecuted in the war crimes trials, but the American soldiers'
testimonies were generally not entered into evidence, and those two had their
convictions commuted, to the bitterness of many surviving soldiers. As with most
who survive such ordeals, the men were not eager to relive the experience by talking
about it, and most people did not want to hear it. Many of those men to this
day have trouble coming to grips with their Berga experience, and many are stilled
crippled in one way or another.

In
his first chapter of debunking the "myth," Rubinstein’s thesis collapsed.
He was obviously an apologist posing as a myth debunker. Rubinstein's efforts
in his other chapters fared similarly under scrutiny. This essay will present
one more example.

Rubinstein devotes
a chapter to exploding the "myth" that the allies could have bombed
Auschwitz. If something that was seemingly well intended could have been done,
Rubinstein went to lengths to show how it would not have helped. At every turn,
he absolved American and Allied inaction. Rubinstein’s strategy was showing that
any plans would have been ineffective, or they had been enacted, they would have
been too late, etc. In Rubinstein's view, the Americans and the Allies were full
of good intentions, but were helpless in the face of Nazi evil. He castigated
others repeatedly for their hindsight, proposing things today that nobody proposed
back then, but when he dealt with things that were proposed back then,
Rubinstein used hindsight himself to show how even if the Allies had tried to
bomb Auschwitz, it probably would have saved few Jews, from what we know today.

When Rubinstein noted that nothing was proposed
or a proposal rejected, such as the ransom of 70,000 Romanian Jews by the Nazis,
Rubinstein ignored the anti-Semitism that likely fueled the rejection, and instead
showed that even if attempted, it would have been futile.

When
something was proposed and ignored, such as bombing the crematorium at Auschwitz,
Rubinstein then showed how the inaction was somehow justified because it would
not have mattered if they tried anyway, because of logistical problems or that
it was too late. Rubinstein seemed to have completely ignored the entire purpose
of the work of Wyman and others (even though he stated that his work was a response
to Wyman’s), which is basically, "What can we learn from those events to
prevent it from happening in the future?" On that score, Rubinstein provided
no answers and heaps all the blame for the Holocaust on Hitler's and his cronies'
shoulders. Rubinstein emphasized one "feasible" solution not
tried: assassinating Hitler.

For another
example of Rubinstein's tactics, he made a bold statement on page 84:

"Not
one plan or proposal, made anywhere in the democracies by either Jews or non-Jewish
champions of the Jews once the mass murder of the Jews in Europe had begun, could
have rescued one single Jew who perished in the Nazi Holocaust."

The parents of Kurt Klein were just two of
many thousands of Jews who tried getting out of Europe but were stymied by the
"paper walls." The Kleins died in Auschwitz. Rubinstein can probably
argue that those Saint Louis passengers who died in the death camps, in
spite of the desperate actions by Jewish organizations and others to get those
people into America, were stranded in Europe before the Final Solution
was carried out.

One issue that Rubinstein
failed to deal with, and others have mentioned this "lapse" in his logic,
was that many plans would have been proposed if the proponents felt that they
had a prayer at being implemented in the day's political climate. For instance,
most American Jews would have wanted Kurt Klein's parents to be able to come to
America, and there in fact were attempts to raise immigration quotas, but when
the most innocent of victims, Jewish children, were given the cold shoulder by
America when the Wagner-Rogers bill died, how realistic was it to campaign to
let in more Jewish adults? Jews in America at times did not want more
Jews being let into the United States, because every Jewish refugee admitted further
fanned American anti-Semitism.[143] The Jewish groups themselves
have been roundly criticized by many for doing very little to avert the fate of
those in the Jewish Holocaust. Kurt Klein, as a teenager, even naïvely went to
Washington D.C. himself and pled with the government to do something about his
parents' plight. His response to Rubinstein's assessment might be intriguing.

Regarding
Auschwitz particularly, Rubinstein devoted a chapter to debunking the notion that
bombing Auschwitz would have been helpful or even really possible. Early in his
Auschwitz chapter, Rubinstein flatly states,

"As
we have seen from the detailed discussions of the plans for 'rescue' actually
put forward during the war, the bombing of Auschwitz was never, at any time, included
among the proposals made by Jewish or non-Jewish groups concerned with the plight
of Europe's Jews."[144]

In
the pages after that unequivocal statement, Rubinstein discusses the proposals
for the bombing of Auschwitz that were made by "Jewish and non-Jewish
groups," noting the individuals who originally presented pleas to bomb the
railroads leading to Auschwitz, then the proposals put forth by groups to bomb
Auschwitz itself, again by various concerned groups, both Jewish and non-Jewish.
He even mentions how the War Refugee Board initially rejected the idea of bombing
Auschwitz in August 1944, to eventually make the suggestion tentatively in October
and emphatically in November.[145] That hardly jibes with Rubinstein's statement
that nobody ever proposed to bomb Auschwitz.

Then
Rubinstein made the case that when the proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made, it
was too late to do any good. In particular, Rubinstein assailed Wyman's notion
that the Allies could have successfully bombed Auschwitz, and he cited expert
critiques of Wyman's work, and concluded that bombing Auschwitz was not feasible.

Rubinstein, while doing zero original work
on the subject, nearly hung his hat on the analyses of James Kitchens and Richard
Levy, noting that their analyses devastate Wyman's analysis.[146] The last word today on the issue is the analysis
done by Stuart G. Erdheim, who argues more convincingly than Levy and Kitchens
that yes, Auschwitz could have readily been bombed if the Allies had made it a
priority.[147] Erdheim essentially takes apart
the arguments of Kitchens and Levy. According to Robert Herzstein, he asked Levy
the Auschwitz bombing question after Levy had given a speech at the Holocaust
Museum. Levy's immediate response was that the allies could have "plastered"
Auschwitz.[148]
I do not advocate any violent solutions, but bombing the crematoria at Auschwitz
would have killed very few people if done during the daytime when the Jews were
working outside the camps. The issue here is whether Rubinstein disposed of another
myth. He tried to, but had dubious success. His entire book is like that, and
is the most prominent response to Wyman’s work.

Why
write history? What is history good for? To understand what happened, in order
to apply the lessons to today, and perhaps avoiding the same mistakes from being
repeated? That is my view. Rubinstein regularly
mentioned the "ahistorical" nature of the work he critiqued. Rubinstein
concludes his book with the sentiment that the "democracies" did all
they could to prevent or minimize the Jewish Holocaust, which was nearly nothing
at all, because nothing was possible. He finishes with,

"Conversely,
it cannot be emphasized too strongly that responsibility for the Holocaust lies
solely and wholly with Adolf Hitler, the SS and their accomplices, and with no
one else. In searching for a rational explanation of modern history's greatest
crime, it is important that we do not assign guilt to those who were innocent."[149]

With that finale, Rubinstein takes the lawyer's
position, making a select few culpable, and exonerating everybody else. It is
an example of the "head-on-a-platter" theory. In that perspective,
there are only a few bad guys in the world, making victims of the rest of us.
The system or general populace is never responsible for bad things happening -
it is only a few bad apples, the standard establishment apologist rationale.
There is nothing to reform, because everything works fine. If something such
a holocaust or Watergate happens, it is because a few bad people brought it into
being.[150] In a sense, it is almost the conspiracy theorist's
worldview. The institutional analysis of people such as Edward
Herman, Noam Chomsky and Howard
Zinn are anathema to establishment apologists. The Chomsky-types spread wide
the responsibility for mass events such as the Jewish Holocaust. They understand
that making a few people the only guilty parties avoids the main issue, which
is that each one of us become a little introspective, asking ourselves what we
can do to help make sure such events never happen. Rubinstein’s has a lawyer's
view of the world, assessing guilt to the open perpetrators, sometimes, while
exonerating the larger dynamics that helped it happen.

Rubinstein
ignored the thousand years of anti-Semitism in the West as a contributing factor,
and its steep climb during the 1930s and 1940s. Rubinstein also ignored the geopolitical
factors that stunted Germany's imperial ambition, including the humiliation and
deliberate lack of understanding shown by the other Western nations for why World
War I happened. Invisible to Rubinstein is the thousand years of nearly continual
warfare that characterized the West, and how such a culture of violence helped
spawn such ideas as the Final Solution, a plan that was not hatched until the
insanity of war gripped Germany and they began losing. Rubinstein may argue that
such an analysis is beyond the scope of his work, but his work is little or no
help in understanding why holocausts happen or how to prevent future ones.

Hindsight can be misused, and all the Monday-morning
quarterbacking that people have used regarding the Jewish Holocaust and many other
events can be a dubious undertaking. Yet, should not the point should be this:
"What could we have done?" Even if such acts may partly be wishful
thinking in hindsight, can it be a valuable process of understanding what happened,
and preventing it from happening again? It is in that spirit that I wholly approve
of the work of Wyman and others like him. The presentism
arguments have a certain merit, especially when trying to make FDR more culpable
for the Jewish Holocaust than he really was. For his time, FDR was a Jew-lover,
placing many Jews in his administration, which engendered a lot of animosity and
fear in America, where many called his New Deal the "Jew Deal." FDR
was a politician for sure, and he bowed to the winds of public opinion often.
Blaming FDR for America's inaction during the Jewish Holocaust is related to blaming
Hitler for the Jewish Holocaust. That mentality is "blame the leaders, exonerate
the herd." No U.S. president has ever been a visionary leader. That is
not how American politics works.

Perhaps
the closest thing that America has had to a visionary president was JFK, but that
is also a mixed bag. He made visionary statements that inspired millions of Americans,
such as his landing-on-the-moon-by-1970 speech,
his "What can you do for your country?" speech, his Peace Corps and New Frontier ideas, etc. Kennedy
did not dream it all up himself. He had speechwriters and advisers who helped
polish that image. He was a politician also, and reading the record on his administration
is not always pleasant. He was not exactly at the forefront of the Civil Rights
issue, but played the politician, bowing to the winds of change, trying to seem
like a leader when it was advantageous. He was close buddies with Joe McCarthy,
for instance, and agreed with the witch-hunt mentality that prevailed during the
McCarthy days. Kennedy presided over the beginning of the Vietnam War.

JFK was probably
killed because he ticked off some pretty powerful people, and had to go.
Noam Chomsky will disagree with me here, but it looks like JFK's decidedly tame
outlook ticked off the hawks in the military and other high places. He would
not call in air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, refused to invade Cuba over
the Missile Crisis, over the protestations of his advisers, and was making noises
about pulling out of Vietnam. Busting the Mafia made him hated in those circles,
and they had a hand in his death.

Jack
Ruby was far from the small time nightclub owner that people such as Gerald Posner
made him out to be. Gary Wean saw Ruby in the company of Mick Cohen more than once, and Wean once had a conversation
with Ruby where he frankly told Gary, even knowing that Gary was a cop, that the
mob was moving its operations to Havana, where all the action was. Castro's revolution
ended that, which was one reason that JFK was killed, according to my research.
Kennedy was not exactly a Christ-like figure, but he was not nearly as bellicose
as the hawks would have liked. The Eisenhower years were characterized by Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles, whose notion of diplomacy with the Soviets was to
continually threaten nuclear war. Dulles' "diplomacy" coined the term
"brinksmanship." Kennedy was far too gentle for
that kind of stance, and it probably led to his death.

Winnowing
the innocent from the guilty is a nearly pointless exercise in the end. The question
that always faces us is this: "What will I do?" We face it each
and every day, and our collective answer to that question determines what
kind of world we live in. It is lunacy to argue that the day’s anti-Semitism,
which pervaded the West, had nothing to do with the Jewish Holocaust, except in
Hitler's fevered mind. It is lunacy to argue that the West's constant war-like
mentality had nothing to do with what happened during World War II. It is blind
to not consider the political-economic realities that led a Hitler to come to
power, realities that every single citizen of the West had a hand in, to one degree
or another. This site’s spiritual essay makes the case
for that being literally true.

It is
annoying when people "debunk" myths, acting as if they are objective,
when they are really performing apologetics. There is probably no true objectivity
anywhere. There are personal truths, national truths, and even universal truths,
but each one is at least partly dependent on who is perceiving the truth, making
it their own truth. I am not objective. I am not even disinterested, which is
the ideal historian's perspective, in many circles. Mitchell Bard, for instance,
is far harder on Rubinstein's work than this essay has been. A review by Robert
Herzstein was scathing.[151] The point of
scholarship such as Wyman's is that few people really cared about what
happened to the Jews, which was the primary reason for the inaction. That is
the central point and the one to argue with, which Rubinstein does not really
address.

In support of Rubinstein's
thesis, once the stage had been set, through:

Long
centuries of anti-Semitism that had caused Eastern Europe to be so highly populated
with Jews;

The incessant warring of
the European nations for a millennium;

The
stunting of Germany's imperial ambition by the other imperial powers that led
to World War I, and them deciding to punish Germany instead of trying to get of
the root of the problem, which is imperial ambition itself;

The
subsequent economic hardships of war reparations, hyperinflation and the Great
Depression that allowed Hitler to come to power; and

For
the Jews of Western Europe in particular, the stage was further set through the
other Western nations barring/limiting the immigration of fleeing Jews;

then
when Germany invaded Poland and eventually Eastern Europe, those Jews in those
regions were largely doomed, although many in the local populations were
willing accomplices, eagerly moving into empty Jewish homes, hunting Jews, etc.
If the Allies had committed themselves to trying to mitigate the Jewish Holocaust,
and there is no evidence that they did to any significant degree, it is questionable
how successful they would have been. Yet, that is also a judgment in hindsight.
Regarding bombing Auschwitz and other potential attempts to mitigate the Jewish
Holocaust, such as buying those Romanian refugees, there is no evidence that they
were taken seriously. With the Romanian Jew purchase, the American and British
bureaucrats were genuinely afraid that the Nazis would actually sell them,
putting tens of thousands of refugees in their hands. In the end, the Allies
simply did not care what was happening to the Jews, as they also did not
care if millions of Soviet soldiers were dying in Nazi POW camps as part of a
conscious Nazi strategy. In light of the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo in
early 1945, the atomic bombing Nagasakiafter Hiroshima,
then having a "grand finale" bombing after that, as the Japanese
were trying to surrender, gives the lie to the notion that the war planners had
much concern for civilian lives. In the insanity and horror of the times, the
Jewish fate was simply part of the landscape. As Hilberg observed, the Allies
were only really concerned with the success of failure of the combatants, and
victims such as Jews, Poles and Soviet POWs were barely considered among the Allied
press and governments.[152]

Yes,
those European Jews were doomed once the fireworks began, but to ignore all the
factors that led to that situation was the fatal flaw in Rubinstein's work, as
he heaped all the blame for the Jewish Holocaust on a few shoulders, Hitler's
most prominently. Hitler certainly deserves a lion's share of responsibility
for what happened. He was the primary architect. Yes, the Jewish (and Gypsy)
Holocaust was one of history’s greatest crimes. Yet, it has plenty of competition
for greatest crime, and Hitler had many, many accomplices, including Western Civilization,
all of it. It would be nice to point out the great efforts that the Allies engaged
in to limit the Jewish Holocaust, but there is virtually no effort to point to.
Most effort was token, taken after the Allied governments were badgered into doing
something, even after they knew full well what was happening.

The
point of this historical narrative on anti-Semitism is to emphasize the broad
historical trends that led to a maniac like Hitler deciding to eradicate the Jews,
and the Christian world playing along, with varying levels of complicity. The
Jews also have some responsibility for their fate. Their insular ways
among a fanatical and intolerant Christian culture made them logical scapegoats
when something went wrong, as with the Black Death. Many thousands of Jews were
burned alive for "bringing" the Black Death to Europe. The Jewish Holocaust
is the most extreme example of scapegoating the world has ever seen.

Hilberg's
Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders provides keen insights into how everybody
had a hand in the Holocaust, to one degree or another. The rare "altruists"
in the Holocaust, who risked much for no temporal gain to help the Jews, are the
only people who could even try to avoid some responsibility. Yet few,
if any, of them will point the finger at anyone, and all likely asked themselves
everyday what more they could have done. The European nations that had relatively
small populations of Jews were in that situation because they had historic hostility
to the Jews. Places such as Poland and the Netherlands had large Jewish populations
precisely because they welcomed Jews when nobody else in Europe did. Denmark
can hold its head high for saving its Jews in World War II, as can Finland, but
centuries of Lutheran-inspired persecution of the Jews is primarily why those
nations had such small Jewish populations in 1939. The militarism of those nations
over the centuries also contributed to the mentality that made events like the
Final Solution possible. They all had a hand in the Jewish Holocaust, to one
degree or another. Making Hitler the fiend who was responsible for it all might
seem comforting, but it deflects responsibility, and helps people avoid the introspection
that asks, "What could I have done? What can I do today?"

The
point I am trying to make is not feeling guilty and worthless about it, but asking
ourselves how we contribute to our world in every waking moment, and how we effect
the world for good or ill with our every action. Should not the study of history
be about learning from the past, so we are inspired by the noble actions of our
ancestors, educated by the less than noble, so we can avoid the pitfalls that
our ancestors stumbled into, and aspire to attain or exceed their loftiest moments?
Histories that make fake heroes, scapegoats and invisible victims do not seem
useful, and even worse, can give us a false sense of how the world has worked.
Understanding the actions of our ancestors and the tapestry of dynamics
behind them is very different from justifying them, or condemning
them.

Other "Myth Debunking" Concerning the Holocaust

There is a booklet is titled The Facts - and the
Myths - about the Holocaust. It was banned in Germany, and is published by
Andrew Carter. I got my copy through The Spotlight, a far right publication
that is called neonazi. I subscribed to The Spotlight for years, and it
is obsessed with Israel. Carter's pamphlet summarizes the main lines of
argument that the Jewish Holocaust deniers have taken. Holocaust denier scholarship
is some curious scholarship indeed.

A classic piece of Holocaust denier literature is Richard Harwood's
(not his real name) Did Six Million Really Die? It is easily found on
the Internet today. Harwood began his work with an unfortunate fact: wartime
propaganda by the Allies against the Germans in World War I, with tales of Germans
gleefully killing babies, smells like the story of the Jewish Holocaust. The
truth is always the first casualty of any war, and all governments lie to their
subjects in time of war. People need to be fed lies to justify murdering others.
Beginning with that fact, Harwood made his case. He equated nationalism with
Nazism, which in a sense it was, which says something about nationalism (Pol Pot
was a nationalist more than a communist). Harwood discussed how Britain and America
are threatened by "alien races in their midst." White people in America,
like me, are among the "alien races" in America. To argue that white
America is threatened with "alien races" in its midst is virulently
racist. That is the kind of false argument that the Aryan Nation and other far
right groups engage in. Harwood also mentioned the Jewish attempts over the millennia
to keep their race pure, which is also true. Jews have been racist in that respect.
Score another point for Harwood. The problem is, however, that a spoonful of
truth helps the BS go down, as with all disinformation. Harwood began making
his case that six million Jews did not die in the Jewish Holocaust, that it was
a fiction that the Jews have used to further their aims, such as establishing
Israel and wresting huge reparations from Germany.

Harwood
then discussed the Nazi policy of getting Jews to emigrate from the Reich. That
is also true. Harwood discussed issues that other historians have made, and it
is hard to argue with his point of pre-war Nazi policy toward the Jews, such as
the plan to ship the Jews to Madagascar. Harwood then discussed America's internment
of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and how the Nazis were still trying
to expel Jews well into the war, which was also true. Harwood's used facts to
make his case, but they were selectively presented. European anti-Semitism received
only passing mention in Harwood's presentation, which was the fatal flaw in his
arguments. Harwood was grinding an ax. In his next section, titled, "Population
and Emigration," Harwood's arguments took a steep slide into the bizarre.

Being a CPA and corporate controller, I am
a specialist in the creation and presentation of statistical data, and have done
it for a living for many years. Data alone fails to impress, as it often needs
to be dug into, to see how it was generated, how it is presented, what is being
left out, what it does not measure, etc. Analyzing the statistical games that
William Rubinstein, Julian Simon,
Elizabeth Whelan, Steven
Milloy and other establishment apologists have played has been educational.
Much is deeply flawed, if not dishonest. Yet, the presentations can be subtle
in their deception, and some statistical sleights of hand better done than others.

Harwood's calculation of the Jewish population
subject to Nazi control is about the shoddiest statistical manipulation I have
ever seen, reminiscent of watching somebody play the shell game with his "customers."
Harwood took one number from one source, subtracted numbers from other sources,
and developed a highly creative arithmetic, arriving at a number of only three
million Jews under Nazi control during the Final Solution, and made the case that
there were not even six million Jews that could have been annihilated by
the Nazis. There are numerous sources of information on the Jewish populations
in Europe during the Jewish Holocaust and how many died. Accurate numbers are
difficult to perfectly adduce given the circumstances, but Harwood made millions
of Jews vanish with his arithmetic gamesmanship. Responsible scholarship puts
the number of Jews subject to the Final Solution at around ten million. Nazi
documents show that they had planned to deport nearly six million Jews in late
1940.[153] Comparing
Harwood's methodology with the responsible scholarship on the issue can be informative.[154]

Harwood continued his analyses, and again used
facts to make his case, such as the fact that no signed orders for the Final Solution
can be gathered from the historical record. It is another creative rendition
of the facts. Yes, there is no written order from Hitler that has survived, ordering
the liquidation of Jews. Does that mean there was no "Final Solution,"
or that they were playing the plausible deniability game, which all politicians
know how to play, especially for something as damning as exterminating an entire
ethnic group? Harwood's arguments become increasingly weak, and his numbers games
move his work into the category that Ward Churchill calls "tripe."[155]
With all the other Holocaust denial (or as they prefer calling themselves, "Revisionists")
literature I have seen, the trends are the same.

What
most Holocaust deniers do is take events out of context, greatly exaggerate them
or minimize them, depending on their rhetorical need, or misrepresent the evidence
to make their claims. This essay will not take the reader down the long sordid
trail of their "evidence" and how they play their game, but will summarize
their main lines of attack, and give some examples of their craft.

One
common charge by the Holocaust deniers is that the accounts of concentration camp
survivors are uniformly unreliable, an angle that is particularly insulting to
the survivors. The "skeptical" movement uses a nearly identical tactic
to deny that UFO contactees had legitimate experiences
and other "paranormal" activity. Mr. Skeptic,
who I debated for months on the Internet, was expert on that angle. In his theorizing,
everybody associated with Dennis had faulty memory, or was deluded about what
was really happening. With that line of reasoning, he was able to boldly state
that Dennis' perception of persecution was a "delusion." All we know
are our human experiences. What goes on between our ears is all we truly know.
Many thousands of people have testified to the death camp conditions, from guards
who worked there, to residents who lived near the camps, to camp survivors, to
camp visitors, etc. There also a mountain of physical and documentary evidence
to support the testimonies. Some camp testimony is fabricated and some is inflated,
but that does not mean the entire phenomenon is a mass delusion.[156]
It is amazing that somebody would concoct a body of reasoning to dismiss it all
in one way or another, yet that is a primary line of reasoning used by Holocaust
deniers.[157]

Another fact the Holocaust deniers use is citing
that Zyklon B was used to delouse inmate clothes. That was true, but they then
try making the case that delousing was all it was used for.

Andrew
Carter's The Facts - and the Myths - about the Holocaust, summarizes the
lines of evidence and argumentation that the Holocaust deniers use. Carter also
played the numbers game on the Jewish population and death toll, called Anne Frank's
diary a fake, mentioned Red Cross relief at the camps, called Auschwitz a resort
and rest home for sick Jews, stated there is no proof of gassings, cited unreliable
survivor memories, how nice the Theresienstadt ghetto was, and other "facts."

Theresienstadt was the Nazis’ "showcase"
ghetto. It was the best camp in the Nazi regime, where "privileged"
Jews were sent. Not all camps were the same. Some were work camps, some outright
extermination camps, and Theresienstadt was the great exception. Yet, Carter
tried making that case that if the Jews had it "good" at Theresienstadt,
then there was no Final Solution. What the Theresienstadt case proves is that
the Final Solution was complex in its envisioning and execution, and no mass event
is monolithic. That impression is richly received by digging into the Holocaust
literature. Carter, however, used the anomaly of Theresienstadt to try making
the case that there was no Final Solution of extermination.

One
pertinent aspect of Holocaust denial scholarship casts a harsh light on the far
right. By definition, the Final Solution was a conspiracy. It is about the biggest
conspiracy of all time. The Nazis killed several million people in secret, but
not all that secret. Plenty of word got out about it, but few believed it and
few really cared that much. One reason it was not believed at first was because
the British lied so badly about the Germans in World War I, manufacturing atrocities
out of the thin air. The stories were treated by many as the tale of the boy
who cried wolf too many times, which was one more way that the British contributed
to the Jewish Holocaust.

Nevertheless,
when the word got out, it was acted on by very few people, and met a general wall
of apathy, as there was a war to fight. The Jews were not alone in their secret
suffering. The millions of Russian POWs who died in German captivity also generally
died out of sight of the Western media. After all, they were the hated communists.
The Gypsies died unmourned, as did the Slavs of Eastern Europe. The Germans kept
it quiet, and the Western press did not dig too far, aided by Western diplomats
actively keeping it quiet. Even so, the Nazi Holocaust is one of the better-documented
conspiracies of all time. Not only were numerous documents captured to plot the
trajectory and execution of the Final Solution, but thousands of survivors testified
about the concentration and death camps, including American soldiers. Also, many
who were involved in one way or another in the Final Solution testified, and far
more than just the Nazis who were tried in war crimes trials. Spectacular physical
evidence of the Nazi Holocaust survived, such as the camps themselves, piles of
clothing, hair and teeth taken from the victims. The Nazi Holocaust is perhaps
the most undeniable conspiracy there is.

Right
wing activists are the ones who most often specialize in conspiracy theories,
sometimes concocting them with the flimsiest evidence. On one hand, they theorize
about vast international banking conspiracies,
even though there exists virtually no documentary evidence or witnesses. The
international banking conspiracy does exist to a degree, but there is hardly
any overt evidence of it. The problem with conspiracy theories is that they are conspiracy
theories. Conspiracies, by their very nature, do not leave paper trails, and
they are generally uncovered by circumstantial evidence, which is a shaky way
to determine anything. Weighing conspiratorial evidence is one of the most difficult
investigations to perform, because there is little open evidence and numerous
ways to interpret it. Many conspiracy theories may not be true, but many are
quite plausible. Conspiracy theorists are often laughed at and derided. Their
theories are often assailed and debunked, many times for good reason, but also
many times for poor reasons. In my experience, those who debunk conspiracy theories
are usually defending the establishment.

Conspiracy
theorists usually hail from the right end of the political spectrum, and their
scholarship is often poor. Some of it is acceptable, but more poor scholarship
comes from the right wing than anywhere else, partly because right wing politics
are too frequently the politics of the paranoid and deluded, which also manifests
in racism and bigotry all too often, with a penchant for violence. Right wing
scholars often propose conspiracy theories constructed from little solid evidence,
and have their theories analyzed and debunked by many. The very same crowd that
proposes conspiracy theories on the most tenuous evidence, debunk the Nazi Holocaust
conspiracy, which has a vast amount of evidence for it. That is because Holocaust
deniers apparently have an agenda, which is:

Anti-Semitism;

Rehabilitating
Fascism and Hitler, and justify racist attitudes; If Hitler was not such a bad
guy, then Fascism is not either;

Paranoia
about Jews, Israel and how the world is out to get them.

Yes,
there probably are international conspiracies, and some of them center
on Israel, but Zionists do not rule the world. Jews do not solely run the banking
conspiracies. Some Jews are probably part of it, but as far as I have seen,
the high end of the game is not based on Jewish heritage but other factors, such
as greed, which is far from a Jewish monopoly. There is Jewish organized crime,
it is highly sophisticated, and I think Gary Wean
stumbled into some of it, partly because California was a place that Jews migrated
to in great numbers early in the 20th century, as they sought one more
refuge from anti-Semitism. Today’s Arab hatred of Israel and the United States
is understandable. The Protocols of Zion are almost certainly fake, made
in France in conjunction with the Russian secret police. Anne Frank's diary is
almost certainly genuine, especially in light of the recent discovery that Anne's
father removed some pages from her diary that frankly spoke about her parents’
marriage. There are many accounts like Anne Frank's. To believe that her diary
is part of the Jewish conspiracy is pretty far out.

A
fair amount of right wing theorizing and scholarship is probably dishonest, while
many have honestly fallen for it. I have born some of the brunt of some pretty
huge conspiracies, and know that wide-ranging conspiracies do exist,
but the international Jewish conspiracy is one that the crazed Adolf Hitler fell
for, and it led to the deaths of about six million Jews. Using the same standard
that Holocaust deniers have applied to the Final Solution, no conspiracy theory
holds up.

Holocaust scholars themselves have given the
denier's grist for their mill at times, as there is plenty of dishonest and biased
scholarship in the Holocaust scholar ranks, which brings this essay to its next
topic.

A Different Kind of Holocaust Denial

Two
primary works that "debunk" the work of the Holocaust deniers are Denying
the Holocaust by Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust Denial by Kenneth Stern.
Lipstadt and Stern wrote works to specifically take on the Holocaust deniers.
In Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt does a creditable job of deflating the
arguments that Holocaust deniers use. She capably tackled the Holocaust denier
arguments that there were no gas chambers, that there was no "Final Solution"
of extermination, that Anne Frank's diary is a forgery, and she exposes the fascist/racist
agenda of Holocaust deniers. She probably should have stopped there, as she descended
into making the case that the Jewish Holocaust was history’s unique crime.[158] She has good
company. Elie Wiesel is considered the first to make the "exclusivist"
argument for the Jewish Holocaust.

The
Black Legend of the Spanish legacy in the New
World was black indeed. Its European rivals also used the Black Legend for propaganda
purposes. Spain's rivals in the global colonial sweepstakes were every bit as
genocidal in attitude as the Spaniards, and were even sometimes worse, such as
the English, who considered the natives subhuman, taking
it a bit further than the Spanish did. The Spanish considered the natives inferior
human beings, and thus justified their great crimes. The fact that Spain's rivals
used its crimes against humanity for propaganda purposes did not make Spain's
crimes any less. Spain was the first on the scene and plundered "virgin"
grounds before its rivals joined the fray. The Inquisition
also became a political football during the Protestant Reformation.

Because people exploit
events for political ends does not make them less true. One area where the Holocaust
deniers have made a strong case is in the area of Jewish exploitation of the Holocaust
for political ends. Norman Finkelstein’s recent book is a step in the direction
of serious scholarship tackling the subject.[159] The fact that many Holocaust scholars have abused
the notion of the Holocaust's exclusivity does not make the Holocaust any less
horrible or evil. Lipstadt is far from alone among Holocaust scholars in making
the case for the unparalleled evil of the Jewish Holocaust. What that crowd has
done, and it even takes in some of the most respected Holocaust historians such
as Lucy Dawidowicz, is minimize the suffering of other groups subject to genocidal
policies.

For instance, the Jewish
Diaspora endured nearly 2000 years of forced migrations at the hands of Christendom
and the West. The Jews have not had a pleasant journey. While Holocaust scholars
(almost all Jewish) go into great depth about the genocidal policies of the Nazis
toward the Jews, quite often they minimize or ignore the suffering of Gypsies
and Slavs at the hands of the same butchers. While the Jews were kicked out of
everyplace in Europe at one time or another, the Gypsies were truly nomadic, whose
philosophy was never staying in one place for long. The Gypsies probably originally
came from India, displaced due to the Islamic invasions of India many centuries
ago, and Gypsies were possibly low castes that fled the region, being at the bottom
of the barrel when the Muslims invaded.

Gypsies
have lived in Europe for several hundred years.[160] The "Jewish Question"
was not the only ones the Nazis considered. There was also the "Gypsy Question."
The solution crafted for the Gypsies was the same one the Nazis came up with for
the Jews: extermination. Probably at least a half million Gypsies died in the
death camps, with another half million or more being killed by the Einsatzgruppen
wherever they were found in the Nazi-controlled regions. Because Gypsies were
nomadic, getting accurate numbers of pre-war populations and the death toll is
more problematic than the Jewish death toll, but figures of a million or more
are regularly estimated for the Gypsy Holocaust.[161] Even today, the estimates of the world's Gypsy
population are guesses subject to wide variation.[162]
While Lipstadt made her exclusivist arguments, the word "Gypsy" never
even came up. Two-thirds of Europe's Jews perished in the Holocaust, and about
half the European Gypsy population died at the same time. Hitler's genocidal
policies killed far more Slavs than Jews and Gypsies combined. Perhaps more than
fifteen million Slavs died due to a conscious extermination program by the Nazis
to clear Eastern Europe to give the Germans "living space."[163] The Nazis targeted and murdered
perhaps more than twenty-five million people, and up to six million of them were
Jews. That does not minimize what the Jews endured, but for Jewish Holocaust
scholars to constantly minimize or ignore the suffering of Gypsies and Slavs,
among other targeted groups, such as Russian POWs, is grim.

Mainly
because of Jewish influence in the United States, there is now a Holocaust museum
in America, in Washington D.C. Gypsies are almost entirely absent from the museum's
exhibits. In a telling event, Gypsies were specifically excluded from a candle
ceremony to remember those who died at Auschwitz. In the British press (and not
in the American press, as usual) were photos of the
candle ceremony and pictures of Gypsies "staring mournfully through a wire
fence, with a caption reading, 'Cold-shouldered: Gypsies, whose ancestors were
among Auschwitz victims, are forced to watch the ceremony from outside the compound.'"[164] Jews who have created deplorable
scenes such as that are trying to corner the market on victimhood, playing up
their suffering to the maximum, and denying the suffering of those who died right
alongside them. Holocaust denial is Holocaust denial, and Jewish scholars have
tarred themselves with the same brush they have painted the deniers of the Jewish
Holocaust with, for tragic irony.[165] There is no Holocaust Museum for Native Americans.
During the late 1990s, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Jew (who
recently discovered her hidden heritage), justified
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, killed mainly by the
U.S.-instigated economic embargo of Iraq, calling it a price we were willing to
pay.

Many Jews tried cornering the
market on the word "holocaust," as if they are the only ones in history
to have suffered it. Jews are white people, and the situation around the holocausts
of colored people is the single greatest body of Holocaust denial in the West.
The genocide of Native Americans is the single greatest
holocaust in history, a holocaust that has been so thoroughly denied for hundreds
of years that it has only recently come into American awareness, a holocaust denial
that continues with what America did to Southeast Asia,
and what America is doing to Iraq today.
There is a holocaust denial far, far more egregious than anything that
the lunatic Jewish Holocaust denier crowd has ever tried foisting on the public,
mainly because "responsible" scholarship has actively abetted it, and
the holocaust is still happening.

William Blum begins his monumental Killing Hope with:

"In
1993, I came across the review of a book about people who deny that the Nazi Holocaust
actually occurred. I wrote to the author, a university professor, telling her
that her book made me wonder whether she knew that an American holocaust had taken
place, and that the denial of it put the denial of the Nazi one to shame. So
great and deep is the denial of the American holocaust, I said, that the denyers
are not even aware that the claimers or their claim exist. Yet, a few million
people have died in the American holocaust and many more millions have been condemned
to lives of misery and torture as a result of U.S. interventions extending from
China and Greece in the 1940s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s. I enclosed
a listing of these interventions, which is of course the subject of the present
book.

"In my letter I also offered
to exchange a copy of the earlier edition of my book for a copy of hers, but she
wrote back informing me that she was not in a position to do so. And that was
all she said. She didn't ask to see my book. She made no comment whatsoever
about the remainder of my letter - the part dealing with denying the American
holocaust - not even to acknowledge that I had raised the matter. The irony of
a scholar on the subject of denying the Nazi Holocaust engaging in such denial
about the American holocaust was classic indeed. I was puzzled why the good professor
had bothered to respond at all."[166]

When I read Blum's words in 1996, I suspected
that he was writing about Lipstadt, and I wrote him, asking him if it was. He
replied that indeed it was Lipstadt, and gave me permission to make that fact
public, so I am.

What happened to East
Timor during the 1970s may have had a proportionally greater genocide happen
to its people than the Jewish Holocaust, in this past "enlightened"
generation, a genocide that was actively sponsored and abetted by the United States
and nearly every Western nation. The complicity in genocide by Lipstadt and others
has helped ensure that the American Holocaust continues, as America kills off
Iraqis today.

A better work on Jewish
Holocaust deniers is Kenneth Stern's Holocaust Denial, which discusses
the "hesitation" in the Jewish community to acknowledge other genocides
because they believed that to do so would diminish what happened to the Jews.[167] To his credit,
he mentioned Gypsies a couple of times in his book, and discussed how all holocausts
need to be discussed and their nature understood. Stern wrote, "By focusing
only on one's own tragedies, strategies, lessons, and power are lost." Yet,
he also gave a questionable treatment to the situation of Noam Chomsky and Robert
Faurisson. Chomsky is a Jew who lived in an Israeli kibbutz for a short time.
Faurisson is a Holocaust denier from France. Although freedom
of speech in America is problematic and not nearly as free as our mainstream
media presents to the public, it is less free in supposedly genteel nations
such as Canada, France and Sweden, where Holocaust deniers have been put on trial
and jailed for their writings.

When Faurisson
was put on trial in France, hundreds of academics signed a petition to defend
Faurisson's right to deny the Jewish Holocaust in his writings, even if they detested
his views. It was an issue of freedom of speech. As Chomsky stated regarding
the Faurisson affair, freedom of speech is not something that we grant only to
views that we agree with. If we believe in freedom of speech, we grant it especially
to those with views that we "despise." Otherwise, we do not believe
in freedom of speech. Chomsky and hundreds of other academics were defending
Faurisson's freedom of expression, even though they despised what he had to say.
Chomsky received endless attacks for his stance. Chomsky wrote a brief essay
on the nature of freedom of speech that Faurisson's publisher inserted as the
introduction to Faurisson's book.

In
Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, she called Chomsky's defense of Faurisson’s
right to free speech his "antics." In Stern's book, he published a
decidedly one-sided account of the affair, and even relied on a secondary source
to smear Chomsky to make him seem a Holocaust denier
of the Cambodian Holocaust, something that I have never seen in any of Chomsky's
work.[168] However, Stern also made the
exclusivist argument in his book, pointing out that other genocides had economic
or other incentives behind them, while carrying out the Jewish Holocaust hampered
the Nazi war effort.[169] Every holocaust is unique in
its own way. What was uniquely worse, the Nazi genocide, which was ideologically
motivated from a cultural hatred for Jews and other "subhumans," a genocide
that exterminated two-thirds of European Jews and half the European Gypsies, or
the genocide of the Taino of the Greater Antilles,
which was a mere side effect of the first gold rush in the New World, and
the world's only complete genocide of millions of people? The complete
genocide of the Taino has been so deeply denied in America that the genocide’s
initial architect has a national holiday in his name. How would Jews feel if
there was a Hitler Day in Germany, which celebrated the invasion of Poland?

The words “never again,” should apply to all
peoples, for all time.

The Last "Good War" Revisited

World
War II is described in the United States as its last “good war.” The reason for
the "good war" description is that America's wars since then have been
more problematic, with the delineation of good and evil clear in World War II,
and rather muddled since then, contrary to the recent rhetoric of George
Bush the Second. In World War II, America was the white knight on a steed,
saving the world from the evil of Hitler and his henchmen.

Our
leaders were not too disturbed by the rise of Hitler, nor was the public enamored
with Jews. FDR was not too high on Hitler, and is considered the West’s only
leader who smelled Hitler's fumes early on, and was opposed to his rule. That
is true, but relative. Stalin was little better than Hitler, and in some ways
worse, and FDR took part in remaking Stalin into "Uncle Joe" while there
were Nazis to defeat. Stalin was Time’s “Man of the Year” in 1943. George
Orwell could not find a publisher for his Animal
Farm because it was a satire on Britain’s ally of the moment.

The hypocrisy related to the U.S. position
toward the Soviet Union is enough to make the "good war" sentiments
collapse. Long before Hitler became a threat to the world, Stalin's hands were
bloody with the deaths of millions of Soviet peasants, where the official policy
was starving them to death. The Western governments were wary of those communists
and everything they stood for, until they became handy allies to defeat the Nazis
after Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, after they divvied
up Poland and Eastern Europe. Then one of history's greatest butchers became
"Uncle Joe," with the American press sanitizing his image. It was a
remarkable makeover, from butcher to buddy.[170] Churchill and Roosevelt actively covered up the
1940 Katyn Massacre, which Stalin ordered.

The
shifting alliances of those times, among all imperial parties, clearly demonstrates
that issues of right and wrong had little meaning to anybody, but winning was
everything. Almost anybody would side with anybody, if it meant winning. The
Soviet Union was in the middle of many of those diplomatic machinations, from
alliances with Germany, Italy, Japan and the Allies, to declarations of war.
The Soviets hoped the Germans and British would wipe each other out in the Battle
of Britain, just as the British and Americans hoped the Soviets and Germans would
wipe each other out during the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Germans and
Soviets hoped the Japanese invasion of Eastern Asia and the Pacific would preoccupy
America. The Soviet Union eventually declared war on its erstwhile ally Japan,
and the United States atom bombed Japan to end the war quickly to prevent the
Soviets from controlling too much of Eastern Asia. The U.S. used Japanese troops
immediately after the war to try putting down the Chinese Communist Revolution,
and Japanese troops were also immediately put to work to try recolonizing Vietnam,
even though Ho Chi Minh was an U.S. ally against Japan during World War II, and
was the overwhelming favorite of the populace to lead Vietnam to independence.
Butcher as buddy, buddy as butcher, allies thrown to the wolves, nations playing
off one against the other, etc. The last "good war." After Michael
Adams finished briefly summarizing the imperial dynamics between the major players
of World War II, in the years that led to the war, he wrote, "Looking back,
we might say that the history of the period does not reflect particularly well
on any of the major players."[171] For the vast majority of humanity,
living under the boots of those major players, it was an obvious sentiment.

America
stayed "neutral" throughout the war's first two years, except for providing
aid to Britain, closing off the Panama Canal to Japan and other sanctions against
them, with Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, du Pont and others helping build
the German war machine.

There
is substantial evidence that FDR and the military brass had pre-knowledge of the
Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the troops in Hawaii were not warned, as
a bloody attack would be needed to spur the isolationist American people into
another foreign war, similar to how Americans were manipulated
into entering World War I. The Pearl Harbor attack was certainly no surprise,
as in early 1941 Secretary of War Henry Stimson received a memo from Rear Admiral
Richmond Kelly Turner that warned of an attack on Pearl Harbor. That memo was
merely part of a chorus of warnings and studies from the military brass in those
days.[172] Those boys at Pearl Harbor
may have been expendable.

War is evil
business, and always has been. Violence is always a violation of another’s
free will. Warfare extracts a great psychological, emotional and spiritual price
from all of its participants. There is no glory in it, and a comprehensive and
sophisticated system manipulates young men into becoming soldiers.

Intense indoctrination accompanies the evolution
of all imperial soldiers, whether they are American, Japanese, Chinese, Russian,
European, etc. During World War II are many instances of the psychological resistance
of young men to the horrific barbarities that they inflicted upon the "enemy,"
whether it was Jewish children, Chinese women, Japanese civilians, Gypsies, Slavs,
and so on.

Before World War II began,
the Japanese were bludgeoning Eastern Asia and periphery. As with Jews and Spaniards
around 1492, if one took a Japanese and Chinese citizen, stripped and physically
examined them, one could not be discerned from the other. Japanese are physically
nearly indistinguishable from Chinese, and their culture originated in Chinese
culture. Japan, like China, had a long-standing imperial culture, although both
were rather insular for centuries. China resisted Europe's imperialism for centuries
before succumbing to British ambition in the Opium Wars and subsequent events.
Japan did not succumb to the West until two atomic bombs were dropped on them.
Japanese indoctrination viewed China as a great adversary, not unlike European
indoctrination of their people to hate their neighbors, where Frenchmen killed
Englishmen, etc. for centuries.

Japan
invaded China several years before World War II, with their invasion of Manchuria
happening in 1931. In 1937, the Japanese invaded China and took the capital city
of Nanking. Their initial occupation of Nanking is now known as the Rape of Nanking.
Ever since Japan received their wake up call in 1853, by a massive show of U.S.
force led by Commander Matthew Perry's "diplomacy," they nurtured their
imperial ambition, wanting to become imperial powers like the U.S., Britain, France
and Russia. They stated that they only wanted to control Southeast Asia as the
United States controlled Latin America, a reasonable request in Japanese eyes.
The U.S. and the other European powers had already divvied
up Eastern Asia, and were not about to let a local imperial presence take
over. After all, China was theirs; the Philippines
were ours.

The Japanese developed a strident
imperial nationalism, building on their "Bushido" ethic, which made
possible the Kamikazes and other fanatical soldiers. Some Japanese theologians
believed that their emperor outranked the Creator. When the Japanese took Nanking,
they slaughtered the Chinese men and raped the Chinese women. The Japanese had
a tradition of swordplay, and decapitating Chinese men was the pastime of Japanese
soldiers during the Rape of Nanking. Japanese newspapers recorded the "contest"
of two Japanese officers, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi. They vied to see who
could kill one hundred men first with their swords. The contest was extended
when both exceeded their mark, with Mukai at 106 and Noda at 105. The "finish
line" was extended to 150. Their "heroic" acts were often enacted
on kneeling Chinese men, waiting for the blade to do its work. Decapitating a
Chinese man became quite the art form among Japanese soldiers. The goal was taking
the head off cleanly with one artful stroke, with the resultant spout of blood
shooting in a majestic arc from the severed carotid artery supplying the head.
Japanese soldiers used Chinese men for bayonet practice, with Chinese men being
tied up on wooden crosses, like scarecrows, to be run through repeatedly by Japanese
soldiers in training.[173]
Satanic violence was not a European monopoly.

How
could Japanese soldiers enact such evils against people who were virtually indistinguishable
from themselves? In the same way the Englishman was indoctrinated against a Frenchman,
the same way a Nazi was indoctrinated against a Jew, the same way an American
was indoctrinated against Japanese, German, Vietnamese and Native American citizens,
etc. We all have two arms, two legs, were born from our mothers, went to school,
raised our crops, etc. Even with all their intense indoctrination, the "virginal"
Japanese soldiers, when faced with slaughtering kneeling Chinese, men, women and
children, had to be cajoled and forced into their first kills. They had to be
reminded that they were "only" killing the "subhuman" Chinese,
as if they were "only" killing dogs. One Japanese soldier spoke of
how his mass-murdering comrades looked like predatory animals, when looking into
their eyes. After getting into the swing of things, his buddies no longer looked
so feral.[174]

The
atrocities of the Japanese against China in the 1930s and 1940s is one of the
history’s greatest mass murders, with more than ten million Chinese citizens dying
at the hands of their Japanese overlords.

One
of my grandfathers served in the Pacific Theater, and as with most
soldiers who survive such calamities, he was not an eager fireside raconteur of
his glory days. He preferred to forget them, although he kept in touch with his
war buddies until they all died off, and I visited two of them in my youth. His
sober recollections of his comrades’ skull collecting and other practices are
not out of step with those days.

The
curator of the Smithsonian's Division of Anthropology announced that the Japanese
skull was 2000 years less developed than the Americans' were, and because Japanese
eyes were "slanted," they could not shoot straight. During the fighting
in the Pacific, one correspondent reported in the pages of Atlantic Monthly:

"We
shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or
mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into
a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to
make ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."[175]

In
Life magazine in 1944, an attractive blond American woman posed with a
Japanese skull that her fiancé sent her.[176] When American
homesteaders washed across the plains of North America, occupying newly stolen
land, there was often more money to be made in plowing their homesteads to find
Indian bones than in raising crops. Indian skulls brought up to $1.25 in Dodge
City, and arm and leg bones, "properly cleaned and polished, made knife handles,
'beautiful to behold.'"[177]

Two
of the world's most prominent war scholars, Paul Fussell and John Keegan, consider
the memoirs of Eugene B. Sledge one of the greatest first-person accounts of warfare
ever written.[178] This war essay would not be
complete if it did not recount some of war’s stark realities, realities that the
American press carefully hid from the American public. Sledge’s tale will serve
that purpose well. Readers who do not want to read about such matters can skip
this section and resume reading by taking this link.

Unpretentiousness is one of Sledge's greatest
virtues as he tells the story of being a U.S. Marine at two of the fiercest battles
ever fought. He was an average American boy, growing up during the Great Depression.
He enlisted in the Marines in 1942 as "cannon fodder," forsaking the
deferment and officer-rank safety that was offered him as a member of the Marion
Military Institute.

Early in his account,
Sledge commented on a primary aspect of the Pacific war between the Japanese and
American soldiers. There was an unremitting hatred between the two. Sledge cited
the fate of the Goettge patrol during the Battle of Guadalcanal, as he watched
one of the survivors walk past. During the first week of the battle, a captured
Japanese soldier claimed that his starving comrades near a distant river would
surrender if the Marines would "liberate" them. Twenty-five men, none
of them fighters, but a linguist, a surgeon and intelligence specialists went
to "rescue" those stranded Japanese. The Japanese had, like Europeans
of long ago, discarded the idea of fighting honorably. The Japanese ambushed
the Goettge patrol as it landed, and only three Marines escaped. That was part
of the Marine lore, and fueled their anti-Japanese hatred.[179]

Sledge's account depicts
the typical lives of U.S. infantrymen, and his first taste of battle was when
he stormed ashore at Peleliu. He prayed a lot. His chapter recounting his first
days of battle is appropriately titled, "Assault into Hell." The hail
of fire from both sides was devastating. Sledge described the absolute helplessness
he felt while being subject to such a barrage, watching Marines being blown to
bits. During the initial landing, Sledge watched as one of his friends, a non-commissioned
officer (NCO), was hustled to the rear with a bloodied arm in a field dressing.
Sledge yelled, "Hit bad?" The NCO grinned and said, "Don't feel
sorry for me. I got the million dollar wound. It's all over for me."[180] The NCO got
the wound coveted by most American soldiers: a wound bad enough to spell the end
of their days as a soldier, but not bad enough to permanently cripple them. They
could "retire" with honor, and live to tell about it.

During
the landing, Sledge saw a Japanese corpsman's corpse, killed while trying to give
aid, by an American shell. The innards of the Japanese dead shocked Sledge, and
his buddies arrived and began fieldstripping the corpses. Sledge watched mutely
as his buddies worked over the corpses. One Marine "deftly plucked a pair
of hornrimmed glasses as casually as a guest plucking hors d'oeuvre from a tray
at a cocktail party."[181]
Sledge wondered if the day would ever come when he would become so nonchalant
about stripping enemy corpses. Sledge noticed that when he tried smiling, his
face felt "stretched tight as a drumhead." Genuine smiling was impossible.
He noticed that the faces of those around him were similar. The carnage of that
first day of battle was one of the worst that any U.S. Marine ever experienced.
Sledge watched men being turned into hamburger all around him. On that first
night, as Sledge was becoming familiar with the numbness and terror that would
be his companion in the coming months, he heard a voice shout, "You will
survive the war!" Sledge looked around and asked his buddies if they heard
that statement, and they looked quizzically at him. Sledge believes that God
spoke to him that night, and he resolved to make something of his life after the
war.[182]

Early
in the Peleliu campaign, Sledge came to perhaps the salient realization of all
his days as a soldier. After digging in for the night while they were moving
across Peleliu, in the dark of night an uncomfortable notion appeared in Sledge's
mind: he was expendable.[183]

One
night soon after, while they inhabited their foxholes, one Marine went mad, and
began yelling that the Japs had him. After efforts were made to quiet him, the
Marines had to kill one of their own to keep him silent. Sledge watched one of
his own kill a buddy in the dark, executing him with a shot to the temple, as
they mistook him for a Japanese infiltrator. Sledge was nearly killed by "friendly
fire" during his first day of battle. Sledge repeatedly stressed the vast
gulf between himself and those mere miles behind the front, even mere yards behind
at times. Those on the front lines and those just behind it lived in different
worlds, the support troops unable to fathom the world that the front lines inhabited.
The same night, a Japanese infiltrator snuck into the lines. When he ended up
in a foxhole with a Marine, they both lost their weapons, and the Marine won when
he put his finger through the Japanese soldier’s eye socket, killing him during
their unearthly screaming.[184]

A few
days after securing the beachhead of Peleliu, Sledge was fieldstripping corpses
himself when a Marine decided to obtain the gold fillings in the mouth of a fallen
Japanese soldier. He put his kabar knife to the golden tooth of the Japanese
soldier and drove the point home. It missed, partly because the owner of that
coveted tooth was still alive. The blade struck deeply in the Japanese soldier's
mouth, and the Marine cussed out the Japanese soldier while he sliced the man's
mouth from ear to ear. He put his boot to the man's mouth and tried again, as
blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. Sledge had already seen a Japanese soldier's
reaction as he killed him, but as that Japanese soldier began gurgling, Sledge
shouted, "Put the man out of his misery." Then another Marine ran up
and planted a bullet in the Japanese soldier's brain. Sledge saw his pals quickly
slip into almost unimaginable barbarity.[185]

While
taking a break in the fighting, Sledge rested next to a Japanese machine gun squad
that had been killed. The gunner looked poised to fire his weapon…except the
top of his head had been blown off by American fire. While they sat there resting,
one of his buddies had a handful of coral pebbles in his hand, and was pitching
them toward the opened skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Every "hit"
was accompanied by a small splash as the pebble found its mark in the gunner's
open skull. The soldier was not being malicious, but just playing as a child
might, doing something to pass the time.

Sledge
was then saved from his own descent into barbarity, as he began taking gold teeth
from Japanese mouths. A medic saved him, appearing on the scene when Sledge was
about to make his extractions. He discouraged Sledge by disingenuously telling
him that he could get disease from the Japanese mouths.[186]

The
Battle of Peleliu, of dubious strategic importance for the U.S. Pacific effort,
was until that time one of most vicious battles that U.S. forces had ever engaged
in. At the end of the battles, one of Sledge’s buddies showed Sledge his prized
souvenir, a Japanese hand he liberated from a soldier's corpse. He had been carefully
trying to dry it out so it would not stink. After a razzing by Sledge and his
fellow Marines, and defiantly defending his right to the souvenir ("How many
Marines you think that hand pulled the trigger on?"), the Marine reluctantly
threw his prize away.[187]

The Japanese did worse things to American bodies.
One day Sledge passed three dead Marines lying on stretchers that the Japanese
had come upon. Sledge's buddy groaned, "Jesus!" and Sledge looked on
in disbelief. The Japanese had decapitated one Marine and placed his head on
his body, next to his severed hands, and his penis had been cut off and placed
in his mouth. The Marine next to him was treated similarly, and the third had
been butchered like a steer. After they returned to their gun pit, his buddy
said, "Did you see what them poor guys had in their mouths? Christ, I hate
them slant-eyed bastards!" Sledge stated that from that point onward, he
never had any pity for the Japanese soldiers, no matter what happened to them[188]

The
horror of Peleliu made hardened veterans recoil. In one incident, a camouflaged
Japanese artillery gun hid until the Marines were right on top of it, then it
let loose at point blank range. One veteran who Sledge previously saw laughing
and cursing at the Japanese while under heavy fire was stricken, the most devastated
that Sledge saw him before or since. The tough soldier told Sledge how he and
another soldier tried carrying a buddy they all knew to a stretcher in the aftermath
of the gun's firing, but as they carried him, the man’s body fell apart.[189]

Sledge
began losing his sanity at that time, the battle taking its inexorable toll.
He received a pep talk from his lieutenant, and was somehow able to stay sane
for the next two weeks. The only escape was death or wounding, and despair settled
over the soldiers. The only cheerful soldiers were those leaving with the million-dollar
wound. The Marines never left a wounded soldier in the field, because the
Japanese would invariably torture him to death.

Sometimes,
nearly as despised as the Japanese were the souvenir hunters from the rear echelon,
who were not veterans of the grisly front lines, but opportunists who followed
the advancing line, searching for souvenirs among the dead Japanese. One Marine
major commandeered any souvenir hunters he found in his area, putting them into
his line if they came into his area. One day during a lull in the fighting, two
souvenir hunters from the rear walked past Sledge, walking into enemy territory.
Just was Sledge was about to warn them where they were, one turned back and asked
Sledge where the front line was, Sledge "serenely" answered, "You
just passed through it." Those men quickly fled to the rear.

Right
about that time, Sledge endured the greatest grief he experienced during the entire
war, when his beloved captain was killed. All the soldiers looked up the captain,
and news of his death hit all the men hard. It was as if they had lost a parent.

The tableau of Peleliu was like no other on
earth. War had seen fields strewn with dismembered corpses, but Peleliu was in
a class by itself, with coral ridges, rubble-filled canyons, corpses strewn everywhere,
with crabs and flies gorging on the dead to the degree that they could barely
move. Low clouds scudded by during the dismal daytime and the hellish landscape
was lit at night by flares. Sledge thought it looked like another planet.[190] The smell of excrement was mingled with the stench
of death, as the coral was not amenable to digging a latrine hole. In addition,
many soldiers had dysentery. The island became a huge cesspool of death and decay.
Sledge wondered if he would ever remove the stench from his lungs. DDT was used for the first time ever at Peleliu, in an attempt to
reduce the fly population. It did not work, as far as Sledge could see.

Sledge
and his buddy took over a mortar pit when replacing another mortar crew. The
Marine he replaced did not appear happy that he was being relieved. He warned
Sledge what had happened the night before. Two Japanese soldiers snuck into the
pit and began stabbing the mortarmen before nearby ammo carriers came to the rescue
and killed them. One Marine had already died from the ordeal. The Marine left
with a warning for Sledge and his buddy to watch out at night for Japanese soldiers
sneaking into their pit. Sledge was long since used to the sight of blood, but
as he began settling in, the bloodstains in the pit got to him. He tried covering
up the Marine blood with scraps of cardboard. He reported that the flies stayed
glued to the blood-smeared rock, and Sledge realized how empty was a politician’s
rhetoric about young men giving their lives for their countries, as “only the
flies benefited."[191]

Each
day was a new horizon in loathing, with each new macabre scene competing to outdo
the others. Even the most hardened veteran found something to make him “recoil
in horror and disbelief."[192]

The
Marines lost more than half of its landing force on Peleliu, with more than 5000
casualties and more than a thousand dead. More than ten thousand Japanese soldiers
died during the siege, and only seven Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner.
It was a fight to the finish. The hatred that the Japanese and American soldiers
held for each other made it so there were few prisoners taken by either side.

As
Sledge got aboard ship after Peleliu had been subdued, he asked one of the old
salt Marines what he thought of Peleliu. That old Marine had been in the trenches
in World War I, and was looked up to by all the young Marines as the Marine's
Marine, the epitome of the corps. Sledge had nothing to compare Peleliu with,
so he asked the old salt what he thought. Sledge expected the Marine to respond
with, "You think that was bad, you oughta been in the Old Corps." Instead,
Sledge was surprised when the old timer blurted out, "Boy, that was terrible!
I ain't never seen nothin' like it. I'm ready to go back to the States. I've
had enough after that."[193]

Sledge’s
belief in basic human goodness died at Peleliu, and his faith in politicians who
send young men off to war.[194] While recovering from Peleliu, Sledge experienced
something that many American soldiers commented on, including my father. When
they reached Pavuvu, their staging ground for Peleliu, a woman from the Red Cross,
who was handing out grapefruit juice, greeted them. A number of Sledge's buddies
sullenly tolerated her presence. Sledge and some other Marines took her up on
her offer of grapefruit juice, but Sledge was bewildered, and he deeply resented
her presence. It was no place for women or politicians to be.[195]

Sledge
is proud to have been a Marine. He did not speak out against the necessity of
war. He just told is like it was, from a grunt's-eye perspective. Sledge was
interviewed for candidacy for an officer position, but he was too frank with the
interviewer. He did not "snow" him. In responding to the question
"How do you feel about it now that you've been in combat?," Sledge candidly
remarked that he has seen enough on Peleliu to satisfy his curiosity about fighting.
Sledge said, "I'm ready to go home."[196]
He would not, quite yet.

While preparing
for the siege of Okinawa, Sledge heard with sympathy the reports coming back from
the terrible fighting on Iwo Jima, another fierce battle with tremendous casualties.
Sledge got hepatitis while at Pavuvu. In peacetime, hepatitis is a big deal,
warranting hospitalization, but in wartime, Sledge was given some pills and was
only able to get out of several days of work details, such as picking up trash.
They all got a round of painful inoculations before departing for Okinawa, making
them grouchy.

For all the sufferings
of Peleliu, Okinawa made Peleliu seem like a picnic. Okinawa was part of the
Japanese archipelago, and the Japanese would fight as never before to defend it.
More than 100,000 of Japan's finest soldiers were defending it.

While
preparing for Okinawa, Sledge's crew got a new officer named Mac, from New England.
Mac was the only officer Sledge ever heard who talked up taking on the Japanese.
Mac told in detail about how he would whip the Japanese single-handedly when one
of his men was wounded. The combat veterans rolled their eyes when he started
in with his speeches. Sledge was embarrassed for him, and the other veterans
looked forward to when the big-talking “Yankee” saw combat for the first time.
Sledge trained on Guadalcanal for Okinawa, and he remarked on how generous the
Seabees were with their food for the Marines, food that was much better than their
Marine rations.

The Marines expected
fierce resistance to the landing on Okinawa, of more than 80% Marine casualties
on the first landing, but were amazed that there was practically no resistance.
The first day they marched across the island unopposed. They knew it was too
easy. They marched to the fighting soon enough, and Sledge was in heavy battle
for fifty nearly solid days in some of the most horrific fighting the world has
ever seen. Being a veteran, as he approached battle, Sledge no longer felt panic
as he had in Peleliu, but knew that he could control his fear, and the only thing
to do under Japanese shelling was lay low and curse them.[197]

Sledge
was blessed with a little humor at the battle’s beginning, when they first came
under fire. That braggart officer Mac made an amusing display. A couple of their
men had been killed, and they finished digging in and were settling in when they
noticed that Mac was still feverishly digging his hole. One of the soldiers then
reminded Mac that he said he would charge the Japanese single-handedly with is
kabar knife when one of his men was hit. Mac barely looked up as he continued
digging frantically. Sledge offered him his kabar knife so he could charge the
Japanese. One soldier remarked that if Mac dug much deeper, he would dig all
the way through the earth, back to the U.S., and they could all go home. Mac’s
cavern was ruined in minutes, to his men’s satisfaction, and Mac never bragged
about what he was going to do again.

Sledge
was ashamed that Mac was a Marine officer. While marching across Okinawa, Mac
alarmed the troops by shooting at something, and a detachment of Marines approached,
thinking that there was a Japanese ambush. Corpses were strewn across the land.
When they came upon the source of the gunshots, it turned out that Mac was shooting
the skull of a dead animal, seeing if he could shoot any teeth out of the animal's
jaw. Another time, Mac located a Japanese soldier's corpse, and carefully shot
off the end of its penis. When it came time to urinate, most Marines found a
nearby bush. Not Mac. He would find a Japanese corpse, and send his stream into
its mouth. Sledge watched such behavior with shame for the Marine Corps, as did
his buddies. He was an officer, however, so they did not slap him upside the
head (or as my father once told me, Mac would become a quick casualty of some
“accidental” friendly fire). Just before the real battle was engaged at Okinawa,
Mac almost took out his mortar section himself by trying to empty a grenade of
its charge then tossing it into a group of Marines, getting a sadistic delight
as the Marines dove for cover. Mac failed to completely empty the grenade and
almost took his men out of action before it began. If his "joke" had
given Sledge his million-dollar wound, Sledge would have gladly taken it, in retrospect.

The
Japanese spent six thousand lives in an early failed effort to cut off a detachment
of Marines from the main force. During the fighting, news had come that the Germans
had surrendered, but nobody on Okinawa cared much. Sledge wrote, "Nazi Germany
might have well been on the moon." The casualties were mounting, with more
than 1400 casualties in Sledge's Marine division so far. Then the fighting really
got fierce. The warm up for the fierce fighting was Sledge getting to haul ammo
through the mud, which he said surpassed all the drudgery he had ever done before.

Sledge
found that each time he faced going into battle, it became harder to face, where
death or maiming became a more certain fate with each passing hour. When he wrote
his book many years later, Sledge still had nightmares about going up the lines
on Okinawa, trudging through the mud.[198]

Although
the Marines were the elite infantrymen of the U.S. Military, seeing the worst
action, they did not all live up to those high standards of the Marine ideal,
and Sledge wrote of his disgust from time to time with his comrades. He watched
an officer called Shadow chew out a man for a heroic act of moving ammo under
heavy fire to where it was needed. The men watched in disbelief as Shadow launched
into his tirade against the man, who Sledge thought deserved a medal for his act.

Sledge got a letter from home in a lull in
the fighting. His parents wrote that his dog had been hit by a car and killed.
That dog was Sledge's childhood companion, and as he read his letter in his foxhole,
with death and destruction all around him, big tears rolled down his cheeks as
he thought of his beloved dog.

He soon
was thrown back into battle, and had a continuous headache from the barrage of
artillery going back and forth, which sent him into a stupor.[199] Then Sledge
got into the really heavy fighting. He was in the battle around what they
called Sugar Loaf Hill. With all that Sledge had been through, his most horrifying
experiences were still ahead of him. The Japanese dead laid everywhere in the
mud. When they would dig in, they would try burying the dead Japanese soldiers
in the mud to try cutting down the stench and flies. Then Sledge saw the sight
that shocked the veterans in the ranks: dead Marines lay everywhere, slowly rotting
away. The Marines had a tradition of going to great risk to recover their fallen.
The reason those Marine bodies had not been recovered quickly became apparent.
The fighting was so intense that recovering the bodies was impossible.

The next ten days were Sledge's personal visit
to hell. The fighting on Peleliu was more vicious, but the fighting on Okinawa
was more horrifying. After digging into the mud at Wana Draw in a constant deluge
of rain and artillery fire, Sledge looked around. The craters made by shells
surrounded him. Each of them was filled with water, and many held a Marine corpse,
covered with swarms of flies. Maggots and discarded equipment lay everywhere,
with an awesome stench that never went away. Amoebic dysentery broke out amongst
the troops, and Sledge sat in his hole with his mortar, thinking that death was
preferable to what he was experiencing. It was if he had been “flung into hell's
own cesspool."[200]

To
top it off, their commanding officer came down with malaria so badly that he had
to be evacuated, and the hated Shadow became their commanding officer (CO). There
came a moment during a lull where Sledge and a buddy were looking at picture of
a dancing girl the buddy had an adulterous affair with Stateside. The scene was
surreal, of two men in the bowels of hell, looking at a picture of a scantily
clad, voluptuous woman. The scene struck Sledge hard, and he realized that he
was beginning to lose his sanity. At that moment he made a fervent pledge to
himself that no matter what happened, he would not lose his mind. His resolve
got him through the days. At times during the nights, he felt that he was slipping,
but he recovered in the daylight. In retrospect, Sledge realized how heroic yet
hopeless was the battle for those Japanese soldiers. They would form skirmish
lines and advance at the Marines from hundreds of yards away, to be blown to bits
long before they got close enough to return fire. It was a "turkey shoot"
for the Marines. They were nearly having fun for awhile.

Sledge
related one episode where ten Japanese soldiers came at them in formation, and
the Marines let loose with their machine guns and mowed down eight of them in
seconds. The two remaining soldiers realized how hopeless their plight was and
turned around to go back the way they came. Most of the Marines stopped firing,
but not all, and just before reaching safety, one soldier pitched forward. The
lone soldier left kept running, and just as a "cease fire" order came
from the CO, Sledge's buddy with the dancing girl Stateside squeezed off shots
from his machine gun. Sledge was standing behind him, looking down his barrel.
He saw the tracers deflect through the lone soldier's back, and he dropped. The
soldier began crawling out of the hole where he fell, and the Marines began firing
at him again. One Marine surprisingly told his buddies to stop shooting, saying
he had no chance of survival anyway. His buddies yelled at him for defending
that dying soldier, and kept firing away, finally killing him. Sledge remarked
that the families of those dead Japanese soldiers would receive a letter, telling
of their family’s noble sacrifice, when the reality was that the soldier threw
his life away on a muddy hill for no good reason at all.[201]

The
mud and stench and maggots made for an awesome experience if a soldier slipped
out of his position and slid down the steep hill he had dug into. Sledge saw
it happen more than once, where a soldier lost his footing and slid down the hill,
to be covered in maggots and mud when he reached the bottom, to the soldier’s
horror.[202]

Sledge
called the front the "meat grinder," a huge sausage machine that continually
chewed up young men and spit out its product. The attrition in the Marine ranks
was awesome, with "replacement" troops coming to the front at all hours,
and wounded and dead being taken to the rear. It was like an assembly line, but
it was a disassembly line. Many soldiers die in the first moments of battle,
before they learn some quick survival skills, and replacements came to the lines
and went back dead or bleeding so quickly that the veterans rarely even knew their
names.[203] On
the Okinawa campaign, Sledge's battalion landed with 235 soldiers. They had 250
replacements added to their ranks, and at battle's end, only fifty men were left,
only twenty-six of them were part of the original landing, for an attrition rate
of about 90%.

Another psychological
phenomenon accompanied the experience of that war, and the soldiers who had gone
back to the states. When a Marine returned home, his letters back to his buddies
reflected relief at being home, and enjoying "wine, women and song."
Later letters, however, increasingly became bitter and disillusioned. Some soldiers
wanted to return to the front to be with their buddies, as it was the only place
they felt as if they fit in. Some did. The civilians, although often respectful
of the soldier's experiences and sacrifice, also could not comprehend what the
soldiers had been through. Many soldiers felt that the civilians had no idea
what it was "all about," because they have had it "so easy."
People like Sledge found it hard to believe that those Marines who had escaped
the meat grinder wanted to return to it, until they returned to the states themselves
and heard people griping about the United States because it was not perfect, or
had to put up with the minor inconveniences such as standing in line to wait for
a bus. The Marines saw them as whiners.

During
his stay in hell, Sledge's imagination took odd flights as he watched the scene
around him. One constant companion during his ordeal on that muddy ridge was
a rotting Marine in a nearby crater, an obvious replacement soldier who died by
a shell, his decaying face staring up at Sledge, seeming to mock him. Sledge
had to look at that decaying Marine for days. In the incessant rain, with the
raindrops falling around that Marine, Sledge recalled his childhood, as he watched
rain falling around a frog sitting in a puddle, the raindrops seeming like dancing
elves. The Marine in the crater was similar, although those raindrops were like
dancing ghouls, as Sledge’s imagination wandered.[204]

Eventually
the Marines took the “Shuri Castle,” and then Sledge moved to a ridge and he and
his buddies began digging in. The mud was clay-like, and each spadeful had to
be forcibly knocked off, as it stuck like glue. Sledge and his buddies were under
orders to dig the holes five yards apart on top of the ridge. When Sledge had
dug about six inches into the mud, a stronger than usual stench of rotting flesh
hit his nostrils. He was under orders and had to keep digging. A spadeful unearthed
squirming maggots, and told his NCO what he was digging into, and the NCO replied,
"You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart."

Sledge
kept digging, and soon unearthed buttons and parts of a Japanese army jacket.
Then he hit the breastbone of the rotting Japanese soldier. Sledge was horror
stricken as his shovel glanced off the ribs and hit the corpse's abdomen and made
a squishing sound. Sledge was overwhelmed by the horror and stench, and yelled,
"I can't dig in here! There's a dead Nip here!" The NCO came over,
looked at Sledge's problem, and told him to keep digging. Just then an officer
came by and asked Sledge what the problem was. Sledge showed him, and the officer
told the NCO to let Sledge dig his hole a little out of alignment with the others.
Sledge thankfully dug his foxhole, not straight through the Japanese corpse, but
the hole he dug reeked of death. Sledge was amazed that he endured that ordeal
without vomiting. Sledge's buddy in his foxhole stepped out, slipped and lost
his footing. Sledge watched him slide on his belly all the way down the slope.
Sledge went down the hill to help him, and his buddy, about the toughest soldier
he ever met, looked with horror at that the maggots and mud that covered him,
and Sledge helped clean him up.[205]

The
battle at Shuri was finally over, and then it was right back into the meat grinder
at Kunishi Ridge. Sledge's account is not one unending horror story. There are
funny moments, strange encounters with belligerent Japanese POWs, buddies getting
killed at odd moments, and Marines cracking up and losing their minds, regularly.
One buddy, a veteran of Peleliu, went berserk and began charging at the Japanese.
He was only barely restrained from his suicidal rampage toward the Japanese line.

The Battle of Okinawa was finally over, and
the officers began reasserting their elite privilege over the enlisted men, and
Sledge was kicked out of a nice place that he happened upon where he was eating
a meal, because the area was reserved for officers. Just as Sledge grudgingly
began moving from the area, a shot rang out. A Marine veteran who Sledge knew
well keeled over dead, shot by his buddy, where they played a "dare you"
game with a loaded weapon they thought was empty. The man who just killed his
best friend wore a shocked expression on his face continually for the next few
weeks, until he was shipped off for a court martial and probable prison term.
That was probably a minor inconvenience, compared to living with killing his best
friend so stupidly.

The Americans finally
conquered Okinawa, but there was no end in sight for cannon fodder like Sledge.
Laying siege to the main islands of Japan was next, and no soldier wanted to think
what that would be like. On Okinawa, the First Marine Division lost more than
seven thousand men to death and wounding, more than six thousand on Peleliu, for
a casualty rate of 150 percent of its strength. More than seven thousand Americans
died on Okinawa, with another twenty-six thousand succumbing to psychological
disorders. More than one hundred thousand Japanese soldiers were killed on Okinawa,
and ten thousand taken prisoner, with another twenty thousand buried alive by
either the Americans or the Japanese themselves. More than forty thousand civilians
died on Okinawa in the crossfire of battle.

Just
as Sledge and company began pondering the next battle, an atom
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, another on Nagasaki,
with the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945. It was the best news that Sledge
could hear, as he felt that the Japanese would never surrender. Incredibly, Sledge
was never wounded in all the fighting. The voice he heard his first night of
battle was right. Sledge was an anomaly in the Marine infantry, being college
educated from an upper class family. My father was an anomaly also, forsaking
college to enlist in the Marines. The Marine infantry was the ultimate cannon
fodder, especially in the fighting of the Pacific Theater.

Justifying the Last Good War

Howard
Zinn volunteered for World War II in 1943 at the age of twenty-one, and went
to bomber school. So eager to crush the Nazi evil, Zinn traded places with another
man scheduled to go to Europe before he did. Zinn flew mission after mission
against the Nazis. Zinn hated war, but believed that it was justified in fighting
Nazi Germany. Zinn described his experiences in a chapter titled, "Just
and Unjust War" in his Declarations of Independence. Zinn made the
case that if there was ever a "just war," World War II was it.

Zinn's first exposure to war was a series of
books he read at age ten, about "the boy allies," which was a series
of sanitized, idealized books about heroic boys defeating the Germans. By age
eighteen, those early views were largely gone, and completely shattered when Zinn
read Johnny Got His Gun, a searing anti-war novel. Zinn hated the idea
of war after reading it. Then Zinn read The Road to War, which described
the lies and deceptions that led the American public into entering World War I.

The German sinking of
the Lusitania is the event that finally propelled America into World War
I. The American media presented the sinking of the
Lusitania as a barbaric act against a harmless passenger vessel. It later
turned out that the Lusitania, just as the Germans claimed, was secretly carrying
munitions to Britain to be used against Germany. Such "brutal barbarity"
becomes far more problematic in that light. The day the Lusitania sailed,
Germany ran ads in American newspapers, warning Americans to not board British
ships. Germany later agreed to reparations for sinking the Lusitania,
and agreed to not sink passenger ships without warning. All warfare is
barbaric, but the Lusitania’s sinking, if Americans were given the facts,
would not have been seen in quite the same light. Americans were being
shamelessly manipulated into going to war, with Americans speaking out imprisoned
under the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to speak out against the war, that
"war to end all wars."

Zinn
was partly motivated by the class politics that directed war. The ancient Greek
biographer Plutarch wrote, "The poor go to war, to fight and die for the
delights, riches, and superfluities of others." It has never changed in
the millennia since then. Zinn, however, was convinced that the evil of Fascism
had to be stopped, and he was convinced that if there was a justified war, it
was World War II. One of his war buddies constantly spoke about how the war was
really a battle for empire between the imperial nations. Zinn's buddy was a member
of the Socialist Workers Party. Zinn asked his buddy if he was so opposed to
the war, why was he flying bombing missions as Zinn was. His buddy replied, "I'm
here to speak to people like you." Zinn's buddy was killed two weeks later.

When Zinn packed up his
bags after the war, he wrote "Never Again," on a folder with his war
mementos. Years later, Zinn began questioning the motives, conduct and results
of the heroic war against Fascism. What did the United States really fight
for? The rights of nations to independence and self-determination?" The
evidence did not support that notion. The United States had engaged in a brutal
campaign against Native Americans for a century,
until they were nearly wiped off the map, as it expanded its national borders.
Soon after the national borders extended from coast to coast, it seized Hawaii from the Hawaiians, the Philippines from Spain, and then engaged in
a brutal, exterminatory war against the Philippine people to keep them under American
control. During those same years, America continually sent its troops to Latin
America to keep those nations subjugated, the kinds of activities that Smedley
Butler engaged in. The United States was actively involved during those same
years in carving up China into colonial spheres of influence, shared between Britain,
France, Russia and Japan, brutally putting the Chinese down in events such as
the Boxer “Rebellion.”[206] The notion that the United States was fighting
for the freedom of foreign nations was difficult to take seriously in light of
its record.

What
about Fascism, that evil system? The rise of Hitler and Mussolini were alternately
cheered and sanitized by the American media and politicians, with Smedley
Butler being court martialed in 1931 for telling an apparently true story about
Mussolini's callous disregard for a child's life. When
Italy invaded Ethiopia, where industrialized warfare met African natives throwing
spears at the invaders, the United States suspended munitions sales to Italy while
allowing the oil companies to continue selling oil to them, fueling their war
machine. During the Spanish Civil War, when Germany and Italy both helped arm
the Fascists who violently overthrew the elected socialist government of Spain,
Roosevelt hastily signed the Neutrality Act that shut off aid to the legitimate
Spanish government. Hitler had conquered most of Europe by late 1941, and the
United States did nothing. Not until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany
declared war on the United States, did America declare war on Germany. Our
government was obviously not too exercised about Fascism.

It
obviously was not a war to save the Jews. What about Japan?
They were imperial wannabes, who wanted to control their end of Asia as America
controlled Latin America. Only when Japan's expansion threatened American interests
in the region, particularly the tin, rubber and oil of Southeast Asia, did America
begin the steps that goaded Japan into war with America, such as closing the Panama
Canal to Japan, embargoing oil and scrap iron in the summer of 1941, and freezing
Japanese assets in America.

America’s rage at Japan seemed
far less than righteous and justifiably aggrieved. While Japan was invading China
and committing horrific atrocities against the Chinese people, the United States
did not speak out against their barbarities. During the Rape of Nanking, Japan
intentionally bombed the U.S. warship the Panay, sinking it and killing
two people. Although the Panay was sunk during one of the greater acts
of barbarity in modern times, what outraged Americans was that an American ship
had been fired on, not that it was done in the midst of murdering hundreds of
thousands of helpless Chinese citizens. Roosevelt even had footage of the attack
of the Panay edited, so the obvious nature of the Japanese attack - intentionally
attacking a U.S. gunboat - would be obscured, to support Japan's false claims
that the sinking had been unintentional.[207]

In
1942, a Roosevelt representative assured France that the U.S. would help France
keep its colonial domain in Southeast Asia, a promise it
honored after the war, and then took over on its
own, killing millions of Southeast Asians,
all the while saying that they were "saving them"
from Communism. That is the standard imperial rationale, voiced while killing
millions, keeping them enslaved while telling the world it does it for its bludgeoned
victims’ own good. There is no self-determination argument regarding the U.S.
involvement in World War II that seems to hold up, except perhaps for saving Germany's
neighbors from paying German taxes. America's overthrow of democratic movements
in Italy and Greece immediately after the war gives the lie to the notion that
America was fighting for Europe’s freedom.[208]

Was
World War II fought by the United States to eliminate racism? The United States
is history’s most racist nation. During World War II, black soldiers were segregated,
treated to the military’s worst living conditions, and denied jobs in the United
States. A spokesman for a western aviation plant said, in response to the completely
unenforced orders of the newly established Fair Employment Practices Commission,
"The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities…Regardless
of their training as air craft workers, we will not employ them."[209]
Jim Crow still existed in the South. A student at a black college told his teacher,

"The
Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us only serve as messmen. The Red Cross refuses
our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are
disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?"

The student's statement was repeated
at an NAACP meeting to thousands of black people. The speaker was expecting the
crowd to disapprove of the student's words. Instead, the speaker recalled, "To
my surprise and dismay the audience burst into such applause that it took me some
thirty or forty seconds to quiet it."[210]

The
internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II was deeply
fueled by racist sentiments. Most of those interns were American citizens. Documents
have since surfaced that the United States felt those Japanese Americans were
definitely not a military threat to America, an opinion that John McCloy
edited out of the brief given to the Supreme Court to justify Japanese-American
internment.[211] When Japanese
men escaped the American concentration camps by joining the military, they were
the most decorated American regiment in the European Theater. At the same time,
the remnants of the Native Americans were living in abysmal reservation conditions, conditions
that persist to this day.

Was
America fighting for the freedom of its citizens? As in World War I, America
imprisoned hundreds of people for speaking out against the war, most of them socialists,
such as Zinn's bombardier buddy. Six thousand Americans were in America's federal
prisons, one-sixth of the federal prison population, because they were conscientious
objectors and refused to kill people during World War II. The U.S. government
froze wages during World War II, while the arms suppliers attained profits only
dreamed of in peacetime. McCloy was in investor in a shipbuilding company that
made $44 million on an investment of $100,000. The workers were not so snowed,
and there were more worker strikes during World War II than in any other period
in U.S. history.

Was
the war fought to save civilian life in the warring nations? There is little
evidence that supports that notion. In fact, Churchill specifically approved
of bombing German civilians as a way of "undermining the morale of the German
people." Some generals even objected to bombing civilian targets, but were
overruled by their civilians governments, and the saturation bombing of German
cities began, culminating with the firebombing of Dresden (napalm had only been
invented a few months earlier, and was quickly used to firebomb cities), a city
filled with refugees that posed no military threat, with Germany on the verge
of surrender. Churchill, just as he approved of chemical weapons being used against the
Iraqi people, had anthrax bombs made (the war was over before he could deploy
them), and called for the complete extermination of the Japanese people, identical
to what Hitler said about the Jews. American planes strafed civilians trying
to escape the Dresden inferno by escaping across the Elbe River. About 100,000
people, nearly all civilians, died that night. A month later, America did the
same thing to Tokyo, a city that was helpless to the American bombardment. American
fighter pilots could see the flames of Tokyo from 150 miles away. The planes
literally chased fleeing people, dropping napalm on them. More people may have
died that night in Tokyo than have ever died in any night in history.[212]
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were entirely directed
toward civilian populations. There were even American POWs being held in those
cities, and the United States knew it, but it did not dissuade them from bombing
those cities, killing those "expendable" American soldiers.

After the war, Zinn slowly became aware of
nagging issues regarding that last "good war." He read accounts of
bombing missions that he flew, to thwart the Nazi evil. One mission he flew was
on the city of Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Those Czech citizens were among the first
people to suffer from Nazi expansionism, and Zinn happily bombed them in a mission
that killed several hundred civilians. He never thought of the irony of his actions
while bombing those Czech civilians, the very people he was supposedly saving.[213]

Another
bombing run Zinn participated in was the bombing near Royan, France a few weeks
before the war ended in Europe. There was no military threat posed by the region.
Several thousand German troops were stationed there, trapped and waiting for the
war to end. The U.S. poured nearly a half million gallons of napalm on Royan,
devastating German soldiers and French civilians.

Was
it, like World War I, a war to end all wars? There have been more than 150 wars
in the world since then, claiming more than twenty million casualties. The United
States, the "hero" of World War II, has killed
far more people worldwide since World War II than any other nation.[214] Nobody else
comes close. Since World War II ended, the United States has been alone in the
world in its unchallenged ability to send troops wherever it wants, to bludgeon
whomever it wants, for the flimsiest of pretenses. The people of Vietnam, Korea,
Iraq, East Timor, Indonesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua,
Chile, Iran, Panama, etc., etc., have got to wonder what would have been worse,
Germany or the United States winning World War II.

After
the war was over, millions of people starved to death while the war's winners
allowed it, sometimes actively, in the interest of politics. Africa was sacrificed
with more intensified plantation and mining activity to help rebuild Europe.
Some military leaders began denouncing all war. British Air Marshall Sir
Robert Saundby stated after the bombing of Dresden:

"It
was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about
by an unfortunate combination of circumstances…It is not so much this or the other
means of making war that is immoral or inhumane. What is immoral is war itself.
Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanized or civilized… so
long as we resort to war to settle differences between nations, so long will we
have to endure the horrors, the barbarities and excesses that war brings with
it. That, to me, is the lesson of Dresden."[215]

An
American soldier who fought in the last "good war," Tommy Bridges, had
this to say,

"It was a useless
war, as every war is…How goddamn foolish it is, the war. They's no war in the
world that's worth fighting for, I don't care where it is. They can't tell me
any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a
bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em are the men that
make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think
of the poor kids that are starvin' to death in Asia and so forth that could be
fed with how much you make one big shell out of."[216]

One
slogan Sledge's buddies regularly uttered was, "If
the country is good enough to live in, it's good enough to fight for." How
was what happened in the Pacific Theater "fighting for" America? How
was it protecting the United States? The only two American places the Japanese
attacked (if a gas station in California, shelled by a Japanese submarine, does
not count) were the Philippines and Hawaii (Japan acquired other minor American
imperial holdings in those days, such as Wake Island and Guam, and Guam was also
stolen from Spain in 1898). Both were American colonies, de facto imperial
outposts recently seized. The troops that America stationed to keep the Philippine
people in bondage were the same soldiers that ended up on the Bataan Death March.
Where are the heroes in that tale? Perhaps the Philippine people who resisted
the imperial overlords, whether they were Spanish, American or Japanese. To the
Philippine people it made little difference. Was the Japanese attack on Hong
Kong an attack on Great Britain, half a world away? No battles took place on
United States soil. Just what were our boys defending, besides imperial privilege?

Many black Americans were
decidedly unimpressed with America's rationale for World War II. Zora Neale Hurston
wrote,

"All around me, bitter
tears are being shed over the fate of Holland, Belgium, France and England. I
must confess to being a little dry around the eyes. I hear people shaking with
shudders at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have not heard
a word against Holland collecting one-twelfth of poor people's wages in Asia.
Hitler's crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to its own kind…

"As
I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations of men's souls,
but the applications deal with things. One hand in somebody else's pocket and
one on your gun, and you are highly civilized…desire enough for your own use only,
and you are a heathen. Civilized people have things to show their neighbors."[217]

That passage was from Hurston's Dust Tracks
on a Road. Just before it was published, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor
and Hurston's publisher removed those words from her book, which did not reappear
until a 1984 edition of her book.

Dropping the Bomb

The
two defining events of World War II were the Nazi death camps and dropping atom
bombs on Japan. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claimed more than 200,000
lives immediately, another 130,000 in the five years after the bombing, from radiation
and other trauma, and today another 300,000 people still suffer from its effects.
Those bombs affected millions of lives, few in salubrious fashion. While the
German government has turned the Dachau camp into a museum (I visited it in 1974)
and paid out billions of dollars in reparations to Israel, America has never,
ever apologized for dropping atom bombs on Japan. Harry Truman
proudly justified the atom bombs dropped on Japan long after he had left office.
In 1958, regarding the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman wrote that he had "no
qualms about it whatsoever." Truman's words were widely circulated throughout
Japan, which led the Hiroshima City Council to state that if Truman actually wrote
those words, it was a "gross defilement" of the victims of Hiroshima.
The City Council finished with,

"We,
the City Council, do hereby protest against it in deep indignation shared by our
citizens and declare that in the name of humanity and peace we appeal to the wisdom
of the United States and her citizens and to their inner voice for peace that
said statement be retracted and that they fulfill their obligations for the cause
of world peace."

Truman
did not respond in silence. Instead, he called a press conference where he again
justified the bombing, adding that it would not have been necessary "had
we not been shot in the back by Japan at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941."[218]

Truman
openly voiced the vengeance-for-Pearl-Harbor sentiments that fueled the ire of
Americans during World War II. The war skeptic Paul Fussell
wrote,

"Revenge is not a
rational motive, but it was the main motive in the American destruction of the
Japanese empire. A compiler of An Oral History of the War Years in America
observes,

"'I distrust people who
speak of the (atom) bombings today as an atrocity they strongly opposed in 1945…I
don't believe them. At the time virtually everyone was delighted that we dropped
the bombs, not only because they shortened the war and saved thousands of American
lives but also (quite irrationally, notice) because the "Japs" deserved
it for the terrible things they had done to our boys at Pearl Harbor, Bataan,
Guadalcanal, and all the way through the Pacific.'"[219]

After the atom bombs were dropped on Japan,
the American mood was jubilant, with 23% of Americans wishing that there were
more atom bombs to drop on them.[220]In
1995, Bill Clinton stated that the U.S. did not need to apologize to Japan because
Truman made the right decision, "based on the facts before him," continuing
the attitude of American presidents, with the sole exception of Dwight Eisenhower
(sentiments only voiced before and after he left office), since
1945.[221] Gar
Alperovitz may be the most prominent historian on the decision to use the atom
bombs on Japan. His The Decision to Use the Atom Bomb is a history of
the decision-making process that led to dropping the atom bombs on Japan. Using
recently declassified documents, Alperovitz analyzed the decision-making process
that Truman and his advisors used in deciding to atom bomb Japan.

The
reasons given by America for dropping those bombs were: saving the lives of American
soldiers and saving the lives of Japanese citizens that would have been spent
in a prolonged siege. The rationale given was that the Japanese would not have
surrendered without dropping the atom bombs on them, and the decision-making was
done with the utmost care, and calculated to make them surrender. Other than
making the Japanese surrender quickly, none of the stated rationales hold up,
in light of the evidence.

The Manhattan
Project was the biggest science project of all time, at the time (exceeded only
by the race to the moon), using about 600,000 Americans
in various aspects of it, and it was a top-secret project. Virtually no Americans
knew anything about the Manhattan Project until those bombs were dropped on Japan.
Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the defining history of
the Manhattan Project. After the first two bombs were dropped on Japan, another
would be ready to drop about a week after the Nagasaki bombing, but Truman called
it off, citing that he hated killing another 100,000 people, especially killing
"all those kids."[222]

Today,
the evidence is clear that geopolitical considerations guided the decision to
drop the atom bombs, not saving American lives, or Japanese lives, particularly.
For some time, it appeared as if help from the Soviet Union would be needed to
subdue Japan. American policy took several flip-flops toward the Soviet involvement
in the war against Japan, and by the summer of 1945, the United States was actively
stalling Soviet involvement in the war against Japan. The Allies were already
seeing how the post-war situation in Europe was unfolding, and the United States
wanted to limit Soviet post-war influence in Eastern Asia, particularly China.[223]
The United States began using its influence to delay the Soviet Union from coming
into the war against Japan, so they could end the war decisively, in their favor,
by using the atomic bomb. Just three days before bombing Hiroshima, an aide recorded
in his diary that Truman and his advisors knew the Japanese were seeking surrender,
and Truman was "afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of
some country like Sweden."[224]

Kai
Bird, while discussing the critics of Alperovitz wrote,

"Must
I be trained in 'cognitive psychology' to interpret this item from John J. McCloy's
July 1945 diary, written after he learned of the successful test of the bomb in
New Mexico? 'I hope it does not augur the commencement of the destruction of
modern civilization. In this atmosphere of destruction and the callousness of
men and their leaders, the whole thing seems ominous.' Are these the thoughts
of a man comfortable with the use of such a weapon on a whole city? And what
about McCloy's July 23, 1945 diary reference to 'the nearness of Japanese collapse...'
And what are we to make of Truman's diary statement referring to the 'cable from
Jap Emperor asking for peace'? Such quotes are numerous and no amount of psycho-babble
can explain them all away."[225]

To
gain a better understanding of those days, looking into the Japanese mentality
might help. By World War II, Japan was the only significant place on earth not
ruled by white men. That was because Japan knew the Empire Game, and would not
allow itself to get into position to be conquered. They had a warrior society
that was quite insular, and their isolation protected them from the imperial powers
that were conquering the globe. That insularity also put them behind technologically.
Until the 1850s, Japanese military technology had not advanced beyond the musket
and sword. Japan's isolation lasted until 1853, when U.S. Commander Matthew Perry
stormed into Tokyo harbor in a great show of military force. The "diplomatic
invasion" of Japan by Perry was humiliating for the Japanese people. Perry's
mission was a wake-up call for Japan, as America forced Japan into the international
arena. Instead of merely opening their land to foreign trade, Japan longed to
become like the white empires, even while it hated them.

The
American intrusion spelled the end of feudal Japanese society, and in 1868 a revolution
happened that ended Shogun rule, elevated Shintoism to the state religion, with
the installation of the Emperor as the divine, sovereign being. Militarily however,
in World War II, Japan sought only to carve out an imperial domain on its end
of Asia, and kick out the white men.

Japan
became obsessed with catching up with the white man's world, and set itself a
difficult task. In 1800, Europe, which occupied less than seven percent of the
world's land, controlled thirty-five percent of it, sixty-seven percent in 1878,
and eighty-four percent in 1914.[226]
Japan was playing catch-up, and in the early 1900s it began gaining ground, although
by 1938 it was still far behind the U.S., Britain and Germany, only about a third
as industrialized as those nations.[227]

Industrialization
was accomplished by raping the world and stealing
the natural resources and exploiting the labor of the world's less violent nations,
a pattern that continues to this day. Preventing those nations from industrializing
and "needing" those resources stolen from them has been an integral
part of colonialism and neocolonialism. The United States and Soviet
Union stole large swaths of continents, making them contiguous parts of their
empires, so were able to plunder "internally," although both also raped
neighbors that were not de jure parts of the empire, such as the United States
in Latin America and Russia in Asia and North America, and the Great Game it played
with Great Britain in Afghanistan. Island nations such as
Japan and Great Britain, however, had to resort to plundering abroad, which was
the essence of colonialism. For instance, pre-Hitler Germany had to import thirty-three
of the thirty-five raw materials it needed for industrial production.[228]
Along with their brutal conquest and exploitation of the world's people, Europe
adopted involved and often racist ideologies
to justify it, as if they were "civilizing" the world as they murdered
and exploited the world's dark-skinned people.

On
the eve of the Great Depression, the United States' industrial output was larger
than Britain's, Germany's, France's, Russia's and Japan's output combined. The
industrial capacity of the rival imperial nations would be largely destroyed in
World War II, leaving the United States alone on the world stage.

Japanese
society quickly evolved from feudalism to a fanatical nationalism. By 1885, Japan
was fighting with China over Korea. In 1894, Japan defeated China in a short-lived
war. Japan came to the table with the other imperial powers in the partitioning
of China. In 1904-1905, Japan surprisingly won a war against Russia. Japan was
on the Allied side in World War I, eagerly supplying arms and other goods to a
white man's world at war. The aftermath of World War I, however, saw a collapse
in demand for Japanese goods, and the Great Depression was hard on Japan, as it
was to all industrialized nations. Unlike Germany, which received a great deal
of foreign investment during the Great Depression, foreign investment bypassed
Japan for the more profitable fields of China, leading to further Japanese enmity
toward the West. Japan is an island nation, and it experienced a great population
increase, more than doubling from 1868 to 1930, to sixty-five million people.
As with other nations in its situation, increasing food imports largely fueled
the population increase, and the Great Depression led to Japanese deprivation,
bordering on mass starvation. Destitute Japanese fathers sold their daughters
into prostitution. Japanese politicians began seeing China in much the same terms
as the United States had seen the western half of
the North American continent during the previous century: land there for the
taking, in the name of Manifest Destiny. That other peoples or nations occupied
the lands mattered not. Hitler’s Lebensraum ideology was also lifted from
the American handbook, Hitler seeing Eastern Europe in much the same way that
America’s Founding Fathers saw North America: land there for the taking, to be
cleared of “subhuman” races.

The aftermath
of World War I saw a militant fanaticism grip Japan. The indoctrination of Japanese
boys was intense and brutal. They were trained especially to hate the Chinese.
Their study was intense. A Japanese officer had more than twice as much classwork
as a British officer, and more than ten times as much private study.[229] Beating Japanese military students, and other
tortures, was a standard part of the indoctrination process, protested by none.
Ritual suicide was a dark aspect of Japanese culture, later manifesting in the
Kamikaze pilots who ran their planes into American warships, a fanaticism later
seen when Islamic fanatics piloted suicidal truck bombs into American barracks,
and the recent World Trade Center attacks. The Japanese soldiers
felt they could roll over China in a few months, but when taking Shanghai alone
took months, the Japanese self-image took a beating, which played a part in the
brutal Rape of Nanking. Was the anti-Chinese perspective of Japan more evil than
General Sheridan's observation that the only good
Indians he saw were dead? Is murder an integral part of the human condition,
inevitable when populations increase?

Even after the atomic bombs were dropped, there was a fanatical
faction in the Japanese military that did not want to surrender, and they seized
the recording of Emperor Hirohito, determined to die instead of surrender. They
felt that the United States had ten more atom bombs ready to drop on Japan, and
they could withstand it. The man who crafted the Kamikaze strategy came a meeting
on August 13th, four days after the Nagasaki bomb dropped, and the
day before Hirohito recorded his surrender address to Japan, with a plan to "sacrifice
twenty million Japanese lives in a special (Kamikaze) attack." To this day,
there may be proportionally more right-wing fanatics in Japan than in the United
States, and they can be more fanatical than Americans in significant ways. Vengeance
perpetrated against those who voice views at odds with the right-wing image of
Japan is common.[230]
Japan’s fanatical military leaders did not prevail however, and saner members
of the government did.[231]
Hirohito made an unprecedented move when he asked the cabinet to surrender. The
"god" of Japan had never before lowered himself to deal in Japan’s temporal
affairs. When his surrender speech was broadcast to Japan’s citizens, it was
the first time his voice was publicly heard in Japan. To the Japanese, it was
as if their god spoke to them.

One reason
for the fanaticism, however, was to protect the Emperor from war crimes prosecution,
an issue that the doves in the Japanese government were united with the hawks
on. The Japanese people saw the Emperor as deific. By August of 1945, Japan
was a defeated nation. They were completely surrounded by enemy troops. Its
navy was gone, its airforce was gone; it was not even shooting at American airplanes
that flew over Japan, dropping bombs on them. They were defeated. The Japanese
had been exploring surrendering for more than a year when the atom bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima. After the U.S. victory at Saipan in July of 1944, the Japanese
saw the writing on the wall. Allied forces were rolling across Europe at that
time, and all observers knew it was only a matter of time before Japan and Germany
were defeated. The Japanese began exploring surrender options in July 1944, and
America knew it. The United States had cracked the Japanese code before Pearl
Harbor, and knew the contents of all Japanese cables during the war.

The
Japanese government naturally wanted "good" peace terms in the early
stages, and was anxious to negotiate a peace. Our government was aware of the
contents of those Japanese cables, but did not publicly admit that they knew what
was in the Japanese cables until 1960, and only in recent years has our government,
in response to Freedom of Information lawsuits, begun revealing what it knew during
World War II about Japanese intentions.

By
May of 1945, when Eugene Sledge was living in hell on Okinawa, the bulk of the
Japanese military was eager to surrender, even under hard terms, provided they
were somewhat honorable. The only condition the Japanese were asking for was
sparing the imperial family from retribution. The emperor was involved heavily
in the war and Japan’s monstrous war crimes. It is a vile tale, no doubt, yet
letting one man off the hook was all the Japanese people were asking for. Their
sentiments are easily understandable. Hirohito was a religious figure. Imagine
how the British people would have reacted if the Germans wanted to publicly execute
the King of England as a term of surrender. The British people might have fought
to the last man to prevent that from happening, and the Japanese were far more
fanatical than the British regarding their royalty.

Today’s
evidence shows that the United States government acted about as Machiavellian
as any government ever has. While American boys were fighting and dying on the
islands surrounding Japan, the American government was playing chess with world,
especially Eastern Asia. The United States government, including Roosevelt and
Truman, knew the trajectory of Japanese surrender sentiments as they unfolded.
The Japanese only wanted to preserve their emperor, and would fight to the last
man to do that, which all U.S. diplomats knew it quite well. The United States,
throughout the period of Japanese exploration of surrendering, continually stressed
that surrender had to be "unconditional." The only condition that the
Japanese wanted by May of 1945 was to retain their Emperor, and our government
knew it.[232]
The underlying reasons for stalling Japanese attempts to surrender appear to be
several:

The United
States government was playing chess with the Soviet Union, and its eye was firmly
on what the post-war world would look like, with the defeat of Japan an inevitability
that the policymakers were already looking far beyond; the United States government
wanted to limit the Soviet Union's influence in Eastern Asia after the war, especially
in China;

The atom bomb was the "ace
in the hole" that the United States was eagerly waiting to play; it would
be a demonstration of power to the Soviet Union that they could not ignore; the
desire to demonstrate the bomb before the world was calculated to have maximum
impact on the Soviet Union.

Using such
a horrific weapon on the Japanese was logical, given the hatred that Americans
held for the Japanese, a hatred that far exceeded American animosity toward the
Germans, for instance; undoubtedly, racist sentiments had much to do to with it,
in the most racist nation of all time.

James
F. Byrnes was a critical player in the decision to drop the atom bombs on Japan.
Truman appointed Byrnes as the Secretary of State in the summer of 1945, Truman
trusted Byrnes, and next to Truman, Byrnes was the key player in American foreign
policy in the last days of the war.

Alperovitz
wrote,

"…the then available
evidence 'strongly suggested' that the view James F. Byrnes had reportedly urged
to three atomic scientists (also in May 1945) was an accurate statement of policy:
'Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities
of Japan in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’….view (was) that our possessing
and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.'"[233]

Here
is an example of how those making it viewed the atomic bomb. By the spring of
1943, the Allies were gaining on all fronts, and the end of the war was becoming
inevitable. The early and easy victories of the Germans and Japanese had turned
into a grinding battle of attrition, and the Allies had far more industrial resources
and men to throw at it. The Allies never really pulled off any easy victories
over the Japanese and Germans; they simply could absorb the attritional losses
better. By late 1943, the war's eventual outcome was apparent. The
Germans overextended themselves with the invasion of the Soviet Union, a miscalculation
that climaxed in the winter of 1942-1943 with the Nazi disaster at Stalingrad.
The Allies also began winning in North Africa in late 1942. By the summer of
1943 the Allies invaded Italy. The Americans won the battle of Guadalcanal and
the Solomon Islands by early 1943, the pivotal
battle of the Pacific. The decisive battles of the Coral Sea and Midway happened
in the spring of 1943.

In April of 1943,
the Manhattan Project began building a factory to produce wire mesh with nickel
plating, made by a process called the Norris-Adler process, after its inventors,
which resisted corrosion better than copper, which was failing. The nickel mesh
wire would do the job in the diffusion process used to separate
Uranium-235 (U-235) from the Uranium-238. In October 1943, a barrier more
promising than the “Norris-Adler” screens was invented. The “Norris-Adler” screens
were adequate to get enough U-235 to make the atom bombs, and changing barriers
would delay the making of an atom bomb for months. Harold Urey, the 1934 Nobel
Prize winner in chemistry for his discovery and isolation of deuterium (the first
elemental isotope ever isolated), which was an important part of making nuclear
weapons, came into a heated conflict with Groves regarding the conversion to the
new barriers. Urey argued that changing barriers in midstream would delay making
the atom bomb by months. By January of 1944, Groves authorized the switch to
the new process. Rhodes writes,

"By
changing barriers rather than abandoning gaseous diffusion he confirmed what many
Manhattan Project scientists had not yet realized: that the commitment of the
United States to nuclear weapons development had enlarged from the seemingly urgent
but narrow goal of beating the Germans to the bomb. Building a gaseous-diffusion
plant that would interfere with conventional war production, would eventually
cost half a billion dollars but would almost certainly not contribute significantly
to shortening the war meant that nuclear weapons were thenceforth to be counted
a permanent addition to the U.S. arsenal. Urey saw the point and withdrew [he
resigned his position - Ed.]; 'from that time forward,' write his colleague biographers,
'his energies were directed to the control of atomic energy, not its applications.'"[235]

In
light of that event, shortening the war was obviously not the top priority of
the Manhattan Project, but part of a longer-term strategy, which Groves said was
"to subdue the Soviets." The Cold War was already being waged in earnest,
and World War II was far from finished.

After
the bombs were dropped, the people in the decision-making process began a propaganda
campaign to cast their decision-making in a more benign light, beginning with
Truman's announcement of the bombing. They began
justifying the atomic bombing of Japan as saving American lives. Truman held
to that position until he died. Truman is popularly known in America as one of
the most honest politicians that America has ever had. Unfortunately, that might
be true. The record today shows that Truman's announced "million" casualties
was never at any time the number that was thrown around when the decision to atom
bomb Japan was made. Alperovitz and other historians have combed the record as
thoroughly as possible, and the highest estimate ever made during the planning
process was that 46,000 American deaths might result from a full-scale invasion
of Japan, and the only estimate Truman ever saw arrived at a number of around
8000 American deaths.[236] The "million casualty"
statement, made many times in later years by Truman and others appears to be an
outright fabrication, justifying in retrospect what was done. The "expendable"
cannon fodder in the Pacific was obviously relieved to hear that the war was over,
but it does not appear that saving their lives was too high on the decision-makers'
list of priorities. Paul Fussell has been one of the most vigorous defenders
of dropping the bomb, mainly because he would have been shipped from Europe for
the invasion of Japan, something that no American in the European Theater relished.
The "anybody but me" view of the cannon fodder is understandable, but
does not make bombing Hiroshima "righteous."

Truman
was a standard American politician. He lied tellingly and repeatedly about the
atomic bombing of Japan and the decision-making process that led up to it. While
announcing the bombing, he told America that Hiroshima
was a military base, but the reality was that first people incinerated by
the Hiroshima bomb were patients in hospital beds and children playing on a playground.[237] The real reason Hiroshima was bombed was because
it would make a showcase for the bomb's devastating power. Hiroshima was one
of the few Japanese cities not yet reduced to rubble, precisely because it was
of little military significance. The planners wanted to bomb a city that was
relatively intact, which is why they chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Declassified
files have shown that the initial criteria for selecting the atomic bomb targets
were:

"(1) they be important
targets in a large urban area of more than three miles diameter, (2) they be capable
of being damaged effectively by a blast, and (3) they are likely to be unattacked
by next August."[238]

The
Target Committee also noted,

"that
psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects
of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and
(2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the
weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released."[239]

Hiroshima
was initially on the list partly because of "the advantage of being such
a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction
of the city may be destroyed."

As
Alperovitz summarized the memorandums and thinking that went into the bombing
decision he wrote, "This meant targeting large numbers of civilians."[240]
Such a decision was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention. According to
the standards used at Nuremberg, Truman and his advisors (and others such as Churchill)
should have been at the business end of a hangman's noose for bombing Hiroshima,
and especially Nagasaki, which appears to have been the biggest human experiment
ever carried out.

Similar to the issue
of bombing Auschwitz to save Jewish lives, the issue has come up about dropping
the atomic bomb and why a city was targeted. Could a bomb have been dropped on
an uninhabited island, with Japanese officials watching what the Americans could
do to Japanese cities, and having that awesome display of power bend the Japanese
into submission? The standard answer by establishment apologists is that such
a tactic was considered but rejected as being impractical or uncertain. The facts
are that even though a survey showed that Manhattan Project scientists were overwhelmingly
in favor of demonstrating the power of the atomic bomb to the Japanese before
it was dropped on the Japanese people, giving them a chance to surrender, and
even people such as George C. Marshall cautioned against using the bomb on civilians
without first demonstrating it on a military target, that strategy was never seriously
considered by any of the decision-makers, and the representatives of the Manhattan
Project scientists never made a peep of protest when informed of how the bombs
would be used.[241]

In
addition, extreme secrecy was used regarding dropping the bomb. The decision-makers
were against any warning to Japan about what was going to happen. Although in
the later propaganda years, Hollywood would depict America as dropping leaflets
to warn the Japanese of the Hiroshima bombing, that notion is a complete fabrication.[242]

Alperovitz stressed that Truman and his advisors
did not choose to drop the atom bombs out of,

"…evil
intent. Their motives, broadly speaking, were good; their intentions well-meaning.
Mainly they were people who had experienced two world wars in one generation who
did not want to see a third one occur - and who believed the new weapon gave them
the power to shape events to achieve a truly enduring peace."[243]

Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War
at the time of the bombing, wrote that those who decided to bomb Hiroshima were
"very fine men," but they "should have known better."[244]

Alperovitz
wrote,

"Around the world
Americans are famous for a certain naive self-righteousness, even arrogance.
We like to see ourselves as possessed of special, unique virtue. Ours is a great
nation. So long as we accept a distorted, overly idealized image of ourselves
and our society, however - so long as we see all "good" here and all
"evil" elsewhere - I believe we must inevitably err in our relationship
with others. Many of the excesses of the Cold War - and the overreaching that
produced the Vietnam War - can be traced in part to such attitudes."[245]

In
essence, Alperovitz enunciated the attitude of Nazi Germany as it marched off
to war, as Japan did, as Britain, Portugal, France, Holland and Spain did when
they conquered the world, etc. The self-image that
Americans have is the same one that all imperial societies have. It amounts to,
"We are the good guys." Because we accept that "self-evident truth,"
as seen through our eyes, we blithely justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We cheer
acts such as the Gulf War. We stand by as our national apparatus bludgeons
Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama,
Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua and so on. We inflict great evil
on others, while telling ourselves that we are the good guys. Hitler thought
the same way, as does every butcher and mass murderer. The means
become the ends. They always have, and always will.

Alperovitz'
monumental scholarship has been predictably attacked by American establishment
defenders. When his seminal Atomic Diplomacy was published in 1965, it
was stunning in its thesis: "the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war
or to save lives." America's intelligentsia was highly critical of his work.
Alperovitz was the first one to make public the issue of James Byrnes and others stating that the reason for the Hiroshima
bombing was "to make Russia more manageable." The main problem in getting
to the bottom of it was the veil of secrecy that the U.S. government threw over
the entire affair, with many critical documents only being declassified recently,
with the most critical documents likely still classified or destroyed, in standard
American fashion. It was not until 1960 that the informal names of the bombs,
Fat Man and Little Boy, were declassified. The mainstream media has generally
been the establishment’s mouthpiece on these issues, uncritically repeating whatever
the government tells them.[246] The most involved
account to ever appear on network television was in 1965, in the documentary titled
The Decision to Drop the Bomb. It was far from even-handed, and ended
up recapitulating Stimson’s lies, but it is the most frank account ever appearing
on network television. American is still a nation in denial regarding Hiroshima,
more than fifty years since it happened.

Alperovitz
was the first to claim that Truman delayed the Potsdam Conference until America
could test an atomic bomb. At the time, he was attacked for such observations,
but today they are widely accepted in scholarly circles, even if our politicians
and mainstream media continue to deny it. In 1978, the discovery of Truman's
"Potsdam Diary" confirmed key Alperovitz claims. Truman wrote about
the diplomatic value of the bomb, "I have an ace in the hole." He wrote
before the bombing, "telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace." Truman
was well aware that the threat of Russia entering the war against Japan would
lead to their immediate surrender, which was why they tried delaying Russia's
entrance into the Asian war. The picture became clearer, and Alperovitz' "radical"
scholarship was vindicated.[247]
Along with Alperovitz, British physicist Patrick Blackett was vindicated. He
was the 1948 Nobel laureate for his work in nuclear physics, knighted for his
work. He wrote the first book to challenge the Disneyfied version that Secretary
of War Henry Stimson and others concocted long ago. Blackett's book was titled,
Fear, War and the Bomb, published in the 1940s. Blackett called the Hiroshima
bombing the first shot of the Cold War.

Nearly
all attacks on Alperovitz’ work are the standard name-calling,
emotionally stunted, irrational tracts. One Alperovitz critic asked if there
was any significant difference between conventional bombing and the atomic attack
on Hiroshima. One charge laid at Alperovitz' feet is that he is a grown-up Vietnam-era
hippie type, revising history with his leftist presentism. Alperovitz' received his Ph.D. in
1964, and Atomic Diplomacy, his first contribution to the field, was published
in 1965, long before the hippies (called bums and beatniks in earlier generations)
began showing up in America, long before Americans (besides Chomsky and his friends)
questioned Vietnam. Another falsehood is the notion that questioning the atomic
bombings is something that has come up recently, due to research such as Alperovitz'.
Many prominent members of the U.S. government were critical of bombing Hiroshima
and Nagasaki when they happened. There is virtual unanimity that the bombing
of Nagasaki was a great crime, not justified by any stretch of the imagination.

Nagasaki was probably
a human experiment. A different kind of bomb was used at Nagasaki, a plutonium
bomb, which worked completely differently than the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
never detonated before it was dropped on Nagasaki. The Trinity test was with
a plutonium bomb, but the Nagasaki one was being dropped from a plane. They almost
did not drop the Nagasaki bomb because cloud cover obscured the target, but they
did not want to "waste" the bomb by dropping it into the ocean or taking
it back home, so they dropped it miles from the target. It was an experiment,
used on human beings, for almost no reason other than seeing if it would work.
Nagasaki happened three days after Hiroshima, not giving the Japanese time to
digest it. There was no pressing need to rush things in the wake of Hiroshima,
other than keeping the Soviets from gaining too much influence in Eastern Asia.

Here
is a sampling of opinion by men who are obviously not revisionist scholars, and
what they thought of dropping the atomic bombs.

"…the
Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that
awful thing." - Dwight Eisenhower.[248] Eisenhower was the leader of
the Allied forces in Europe during World War II and President of the United States
in the 1950s.

"It is my opinion
that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material
assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready
to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing
with conventional weapons.

"The
lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own
feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard
common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that
fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." - William
Leahy.[249]
Leahy was the Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

On May 28, 1945, Herbert Hoover visited President
Truman and suggested a way to end the Pacific war quickly:

"I
am convinced that if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the
people of Japan - tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that
it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists - you'll get
a peace in Japan - you'll have both wars over."[250]

On
August 8, 1945, two days after Hiroshima was bombed, Hoover wrote to Army and
Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the
atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my
soul."[251]

Herbert Hoover was the U.S.
President from 1929 to 1933.

Douglas
MacArthur's biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to
the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan:

"...the
Potsdam declaration in July, demand(ed) that Japan surrender unconditionally or
face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the
Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition
to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to
Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come,
it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign.
Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."[252]

Norman Cousins consulted for General MacArthur
during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins wrote, "MacArthur's views
about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly
different from what the general public supposed." He continued, "When
I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised
to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have
been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the
bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had
agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."[253]

Douglas
MacArthur was Dwight Eisenhower's counterpart in the Pacific, in charge of
the Allied troops fighting Japan during World War II.

Those
men are not a bunch of hippies who grew up during the Vietnam War. There were
many, many others with positions similar to those men who were appalled by dropping
the bombs on Japan. Here is one example of what might have been, but was ignored
in the rush to use the bomb.

"On
June 28, 1945, a memorandum written by Under Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bard
the previous day was given to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The memorandum
stated in part,

"'Following the
three-power [July 1945 Potsdam - Ed.] conference emissaries from this country
could contact representatives from Japan somewhere on the China Coast and make
representations with regard to Russia's position and at the same time give them
some information regarding the proposed use of atomic power, together with whatever
assurances the President might care to make with regard to the Emperor of Japan
and the treatment of the Japanese nation following unconditional surrender. It
seems quite possible to me that this presents the opportunity which the Japanese
are looking for.

"'I don't see
that we have anything in particular to lose in following such a program.' He
concluded the memorandum by noting, 'The only way to find out is to try it out.'"[254]

Albert
Einstein would later say,

"I
made one great mistake in my life - when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt
recommending that atom bombs be made, but there was some justification - the danger
that the Germans would make them."[255]

"(T)he
readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings - against people whom
we do not know, whom we have never seen, and for whose guilt or innocence is not
for us to establish - and, in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure
upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and perceived interest
of our own generation are more important than everything that has ever taken place
or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption,
a blasphemy, and indignity - an indignity of monstrous dimensions - offered to
God."[256]

The
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1946, commissioned by Truman himself, concluded
that the Japanese would have surrendered by the end of 1945, even if they were
not invaded, even if the Soviet Union had not declared war, and even if the atomic
bombs were never dropped.

These are not
very controversial issues, but the United States has never apologized for its
monstrous behavior, not just to Japan, but to the world. Being the world's most
powerful nation means never having to say you are sorry, no matter how atrocious
your behavior. As with the Gulf War, as with
annihilating America's natives, as with Vietnam,
as with Yugoslavia, this nation has never performed
the introspection of asking itself why we did it, what was glorious about it,
what those people did to deserve our genocidal violence, etc. As long as we never
perform that introspection and no greater power stunts our violence, we will continue
to do it.

As with the Jewish
Holocaust, there are dots of light in the black firmament that hovers over
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 1954, Norman Cousins successfully agitated
for "Hiroshima Maidens" to come to the United States for surgery to
try healing their disfigurement from the atom bombing. They were warmly received
by many, yet the U.S. government was extremely nervous about those maidens being
in America, fearing that there would be anti-nuclear criticism following in the
wake of Americans witnessing what the bomb did to Japanese citizens. The arrival
of the Hiroshima Maidens was the first time that the American public openly saw
the results of the atom bombs. Until that time, the footage of the aftermath
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a state secret. The Hiroshima Maidens played a
part in the healing that has taken place between America and Japan. The Maidens
accepted their state, consistent with their religion and worldview, and did not
blame America. Also, there were more than a thousand nuclear-disfigured American
citizens living in America at the time, generally Nisei who were trapped in Japan
when the war broke out, bombed by their own government, as with those dozens of
American POWs held at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whom our government knew full well
were down there when the atom bombs were dropped.[257]

At
present, my home state of Washington will be dealing with the issue of nuclear
weapons for the next two hundred thousand years or so, with the immense wisdom
that led to the Hanford facility, a facility that is leaking plutonium today into
the Columbia River. Since civilization is about seven thousand years
old, it took some incredible foresight to plan for 200,000 years into the future
so we could subdue Japan.

The issue here
is not condemning Truman, Hitler or anyone; it is deflating the moral superiority
that Americans have adopted regarding that war, and all wars since, thinking that
they are the force of light and righteousness, defeating the forces of evil as
they bomb helpless Vietnamese farmers, Iraqi conscripts, Yugoslavian peasants,
Panamanian tenement dwellers, pharmaceutical factories, Afghanistan "rebels"
that America armed and incited, etc. The greatest evils are committed by the
self-righteous. During World War II, the killing had escalated to such levels
that incinerating a city or two was not out of step with the times. Nuking Hiroshima
was a sign of the times, times that my parents grew up in.

Some More Myths

In
Michael C.C. Adams' The Best War Ever, he noted that contrary to the popular
image, most returning soldiers from World War II did not get parades, were often
"treated like scum," and one anonymous soldier said, "If you ever
got the boys all together they will probably kill all the civilians."[258]

No
American or Japanese newspaper carried any stories of atrocities carried out by
their own soldiers, although there were plenty. White American servicemen beating
and killing black servicemen was covered up. The media, similar to today in many
ways, were government cheerleaders, not journalists.
The scene of MacArthur wading ashore on his return to the Philippines was staged
and filmed several times until they got a take they liked. The famous picture
of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima was of the second flag being raised, the
first not being large enough to satisfy the Marines. Patton, Eisenhower and other
icons staged their famous photos, such as at Normandy and Sicily. The American
film industry was in overdrive, churning out endless movies about the noble Allies
and the evil enemy. When disfigured soldiers from the plastic surgery hospital
in Pasadena were allowed to go downtown, the newspapers received letters that
asked why the soldiers were let out, and asked why they could not be "kept
on their own grounds and off the streets?"[259]

The average American soldier did not say a sentence that did not
have a four-letter word in it, and their favorite noun, verb and adjective began
with the letter "f." The phony war movies starring John Wayne and other
jingo-actors unfortunately influenced a generation of boys who went to Korea and
Vietnam, thinking that they were somehow saving the world from evil as they bombed
Korean and Vietnamese farmers and their families. The Reagan-Bush boys attempted
to regain the mythos of World War II. Reagan was an actor who was in those World
War II movies as Wayne was, and Saddam Hussein was turned into the next Hitler
by Bush's lying rhetoric. Reagan was living in a fantasy world so delusional
that he told war stories as if he had lived them, but they were really scenes
from movies he was in or saw. Reagan never left America's shores as a soldier
and never saw combat, but he told war stories.[260]

For a man who gave shoot-to-kill orders to
the National Guard, to be executed against protesting students while he was the
governor of California, for a man who liked telling jokes about black people,
for a man who presided over the genocide in Central America, for a man who hated the Soviet Union
and did his best to conquer it, as well as an eager collaborator of Joe McCarthy’s
witch hunts,[261] a man with his delusional wartime
fantasies, for a man who was a failed artist (he played the straight man to a
chimpanzee) who resurrected his fortunes when he pursued politics, for a man who
ran for office on the platform of making his nation great once more, citing a
golden age that never was, Reagan had many parallels to Hitler. The accounts
we can now read about both men, where they were nearly incoherent in private conversation,
yet those around them, including the press, portrayed both men as dazzling conversationalists, gives one pause.
For the death toll they racked up, they were different, but in other ways, they
were blood brothers. Hitler was a real soldier; Reagan was a fake soldier. Hitler
euthanized the mentally ill; Reagan threw them onto the streets to fend for themselves.
I met Reagan's handiwork on the streets of skid row Los Angeles everyday. Compare
the Nuremberg rallies to the Democratic and Republican conventions in American
politics. Reagan presided over the biggest imprisonment effort the world has seen since…Hitler's
concentration camps and Stalin's gulags. As a child, I had to say the pledge of allegiance every day to begin school. How
different was my indoctrination than what a German child underwent? As I was
saying my pledge to the flag, with my hand over my heart, my nation was killing
millions of "subhuman gooks" in Southeast Asia for the crime of
wanting to be free. We were able to pull off invasions that Hitler could only
dream of, sending troops across a vast ocean to annihilate the "enemy."

World War II built the military-industrial
complex that Eisenhower warned about. Joe Marcus was the head of the Civilian
Requirements Division in World War II. Marcus later reflected, "the single
most important legacy of the war is…the military-industrial complex. In the past,
there were business representatives in Washington, but now they are Washington."[262]

During World War II, an empty-headed nationalism
took over American brains. Critical thinking was out, and being a member of the
team (herd) was what counted. Nearly two-thirds of American soldiers in World
War II were drafted. The baby boom began during the war, as millions of men got
married and immediately had a child to avoid being drafted. As with Vietnam,
the college deferment was available, which got the middle and upper class men
out of combat, loopholes that have been available
for the rich in every single American war. Being a conscientious objector
was a felony offense.[263]
Gandhi and Jesus would have been felons in America. "Thou shalt not kill"
did not apply when there were enemy to kill, whether they were Japs, Injuns, Krauts,
Rag Heads or Gooks.

The military hierarchy
in the regular Germany army was far more democratic than America's, encouraging
camaraderie between officers and enlisted soldiers, radically different from the
caste system that pervaded the American and British ranks. The German, British
and Japanese soldiers were considered far more capable than American soldiers.
The German arms were generally of much better quality than American arms, such
as the Panzer versus the Sherman tanks, where the military planners calculated
that it took five Sherman tanks to take out one Panzer. Proportionally, minorities
like Mexican-Americans and Native Americans served in far higher numbers than
the white population. The discrimination against them was evident, but was the
most extreme with African-American soldiers, who served in segregated regiments.
Blacks generally did not serve in combat, mainly because carrying a weapon was
a traditional way to claim full citizenship rights. The Blacks rode on the back
of the bus, cleaning out the stables, for World War II. One striking American
worker during the war said, "I'd rather see Hitler and Hirohito win the war
than work beside a nigger on the assembly line." That worker was expressing
common sentiments in America, which was the majority opinion in the South and
West.[264] During the "zoot suit"
riots in 1943, American servicemen roamed Los Angeles, beating up any Mexican-Americans
they found. The Japanese-Americans were already locked up, so they were not assaulted.

One
more minimized aspect of the war was homosexuality in the foxholes. In itself,
it was understandable and nothing was wrong with it, but the military had long
associated manliness with heterosexuality, and witch hunts for homosexuals regularly
swept the American military ranks. There is nothing "wrong" with homosexuality.
Many soldiers engaged in it not because they were homosexuals by nature, just
as few prison inmates are homosexuals by choice. If people are desperate for
food and sex, they will get it however they can. There was also widespread discrimination
against women in the American military. It was a rather backward attitude compared
to Europe, where British female officers commanded men. The American infantry,
as in all armies, was manned by America’s lower classes. Most combat soldiers
coveted the million-dollar wound. Divorces in America
hit their all time high during World War II.

The
British, for instance, did not look at black American soldiers as "niggers,"
but just as American soldiers. British women who dated black American soldiers,
however, were subject to being beaten up by American soldiers, and American soldiers
killed people over white women dating blacks, several times, in Britain.[265] The Americans
harbored racist hatred for the Arabs and Japanese particularly, but they could
even be boorish toward their French and English allies for their "primitive"
ways, such as not having refrigerators in their homes.

Seventy-five percent of American soldiers admitted to having sex
while overseas, and World War II veterans have told me stories, such as in the
Philippines, where having sex with the local women (who were reduced to prostitution)
was a long-standing pastime for imperial troops. Those kinds of war stories are
not told at family picnics. The American men were considered the most sexist
and racist of the Allies. Any woman associating with American soldiers was immediately
suspected of being a prostitute. More American soldiers were casualties of venereal
disease in Northern Europe than of the V-2 rocket, and during the Italian campaign,
venereal disease caused more casualties than battle.[266] A similar trend also happened
at home, with the venereal disease rate of girls aged fifteen to eighteen doubling
between 1941 and 1944, in New York City.

More
than a quarter of all American casualties were psychological problems, usually
called shell shock. My ancestors came back from war "changed" men.
The common epithet for men getting shell shock was "coward," and Patton
hit men who suffered from it. Even the most heroic got shell shock. Audie Murphy, perhaps the greatest war hero America ever produced,
suffered from shell shock for the rest of his life. One reason shell shock was
so much higher with Americans than other nations (Germany's was less than 2%)
was that America had a huge bureaucratic military structure that had only about
20% of its soldiers slated for combat, with the rest performing support duties.
Consequently, those 20% had no relief, as the whole effort depended on them.
They were the true cannon fodder, and they were doomed men in the heat of the
Asian and European theaters, with casualty rates so high that a soldier was almost
guaranteed to get maimed or die, which led to playing Russian Roulette and other
suicidal behaviors. "Take no prisoners" was the motto of even Audie
Murphy. Machine gunning a parachuting soldier who had bailed out, torturing prisoners
to death to gain information, killing surrendering soldiers, etc., were behaviors
that every army in World War II displayed.

At
home, history books were revised to minimize or delete the parts that dealt with
slavery or the dispossession of the natives, because it promoted "disunity."
Unsupervised youth began getting drunk, vandalizing property and joining gangs.
One way for women to show their patriotism was by having sex with soldiers. It
is estimated that 85% of the women who lived near army camps and had frequent
sex with soldiers in America did not charge.[267] They were called
Victory Girls, and many if not most were teenagers. Once the war was over, Rosie
the Riveter was supposed to go back home and get pregnant. When Valium hit the
market in the 1950s, the biggest customer class was American housewives, getting
the newspaper, slippers and pipe ready for her man for his return from the factory.
Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet only existed in Hollywood’s
imagination. All in the Family was more realistic.

Hitler's
entire program was based on a racist nationalism, just as in the United States
(the original U.S. Constitution exempted slaves
and natives from having those "inalienable rights"). Hitler was not
as much of an aberration as Westerners like pretending. He was in significant
ways the Western mentality’s logical conclusion. Hitler may have done the world
a favor, in the end, taking commonly-held attitudes to their logical extreme.

World War II was not a Golden Age. General
Gene LaRocque told Studs Terkel,

"…I
had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was the first
man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought, What a hell
of a waste of a man's life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling
my roommate's parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part
of your life - for what? Old men send young men to war. Flags, banners, and
patriotic sayings…

"You could argue
that World War Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped. Unfortunately,
we translate it unchanged to the situation today…

"I
hate it when they say, 'He gave his life for his country.' Nobody gives their
life for anything. We steal the lives of those kids. We take it away from them.
They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them."[268]

After the Bomb

After
two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in the span of a few days, Japan surrendered.
It was no surprise that the Japanese surrendered after two cities were incinerated.
The United States government fully expected it. In one of the many ironies of
Japan’s surrender, although the Americans stonewalled the Japanese surrender with
their "unconditional" mantra, after the Japanese surrendered the Allies
did exactly what the Japanese wanted: spare Hirohito from prosecution and humiliation.
Hirohito remained an untainted emperor until his death in 1989. It appears that
retaining Hirohito was a useful strategy for the United States, as a way of controlling
post-war Japan, keeping them from going communist or some other unfavorable (from
the U.S.' perspective) path. The last several months of fighting, particularly
the kind of fighting that Sledge participated in, never
needed to happen, as if any of it ever "needed" to happen. That must
be a devastating realization, if ever achieved, for those who survived the Pacific
Theater battles in 1945, and the families that lost sons in those battles, both
American and Japanese.

Bombing
Nagasaki was not the last act of the war. The Japanese were not engaging in attacks
at that time. They were a defeated people, reduced to huddling under the American
bombardment. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9th.
On August 14th, as Hirohito was making his surrender speech, Hap Arnold,
who ran the Army Air Force (the Air Force as such did not yet exist) staged what
is called the Grand Finale. It was something like our Fourth of July fireworks,
celebrating what a great nation we are. The Grand Finale was this: Arnold wanted
to get more than 1000 planes in the air at one time, for one last glorious bombing
of Japan. On August 14th, Arnold accomplished his enormous task.
He got 1014 planes aloft for one last bombing run on the main Japanese island
of Honshu. Those planes dropped twelve million pounds of bombs on Japan that
day, half as much explosive power as was dropped on Hiroshima.

Noam
Chomsky, who was sixteen when the bombs were dropped, was "shocked"
by the atomic bombing. He did not talk about it with his friends, because nobody
seemed to care. Chomsky said about the Grand Finale, "That one didn't kill
as many people as the atom bombs, but in a way it's more depraved."[269]
The planes dropped leaflets with those bombs during the Grand Finale, informing
the Japanese civilians below that Japan had surrendered. America delivered the
news with the bombs. Japan had been reduced nearly entirely to rubble by that
time. In the spring of 1945, Arnold informed Major General Curtis LeMay, who eventually ran the Strategic Air
Command in the United States, that by October 1945, there would be nothing left
in Japan worth bombing: the entire nation would be in ruins.[270]
Arnold wrote the same in his diary in June 1945. When I have mentioned the Grand
Finale to my fellow Americans, they either say in bewilderment, "no!"
or they stare at me with an amazed look on their face. The
Grand Finale is described rather cheerily in the official
Air Force history.

Japan then
surrendered, still getting to keep their Emperor, and the Cold War heated up immediately.
The first thing our government did at the end of fighting in Europe was hire the
Nazis. Christopher Simpson's Blowback is the defining history of
those events, which have serious repercussions to this day.

The
Cold War may have begun with the Russian Revolution
in 1917. The United States sent several thousand troops to Russia to counter
the Bolshevik Revolution. Communism was a threat to capitalism. The ideal of
communism was share and share alike. The problem with communism, as with capitalism,
is that it was not free. Capitalism is anything but free. Its coercive mechanisms
are different and subtler, but it is not "free." Free markets are a
myth. The free press is a myth. Workers are free
to rent themselves to the capitalists, who own everything, if they want to eat
and have a roof over their head. For all the spectacular failures of the Bolshevik
communist system and its evils, it was still a great threat to capitalists, if
the colonized people adopted it and were no longer subject to imperial exploitation.
The war against Soviet communism lasted from 1918 to 1989, when the Soviet Empire
collapsed.

One reason that American
industrialists and politicians embraced the fascism of Hitler
and Mussolini was it meant that communism would not get a foothold. Fascism
was still a capitalist system, with German industrialists prominent, with heavy
American investment.

After
the disaster at Stalingrad in 1942-1943, many Nazis saw how the war was going
to end. General Reinhard Gehlen had been planning his surrender to the Americans
since the autumn of 1944, and perhaps earlier. Gehlen copied and buried the Nazi
intelligence files on the Soviet Union. On May 22, 1945, Gehlen surrendered to
an American Counterintelligence Corps team. Gehlen's surrender demonstrates how
fractious governments are, with various groups vying for power. According to
the Yalta agreements, Gehlen and his men were supposed to be turned over to the
Soviets, while the Soviets were finding and returning American POWs during its
advance on Berlin. In addition, many in the American military and governmental
hierarchy were extremely hostile to the idea of making any deals with any
Nazis. Gehlen, however, found himself in the middle of a power
struggle in the emerging U.S. intelligence field. The CIA was not formed until
1947. At the end of World War II, there were two rival intelligence organizations,
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and U.S. military intelligence. The OSS
and military intelligence would engage in a power struggle that culminated in
founding the CIA.

The United States
has a tradition of civilian control of the military, and the CIA was a civilian
organization, although military intelligence wanted it to be a military organization.
The CIA being a civilian organization has been a double-edged sword for America
and the world. On one hand, an unbridled military can lead to dictatorships rather
easily. On the other hand, the military hierarchy was nearly united in its opinion
to not drop atom bombs on Japan. For all its great failings
and dubious justification, the American military had a code of honor, of which
one aspect was only killing enemy soldiers (sometimes even adhered to!), and another
was that there is no honor in defeating a weak enemy. If the military had been
in charge of the war effort, the atomic bombs likely would not have been dropped
on Japan. The civilian leadership wanted to drop the bombs, and their opinion
directed the military action. Having civilians in charge of the military can
be bloodier than having soldiers running the government.

Because
the CIA is a civilian organization, people such as Ralph
McGehee have been able to publish memoirs of their CIA days, albeit only after
terrific struggle. Ralph, however, is one of a
handful of CIA-critical employees who have ever published their memoirs. If they
worked for the military NSA (National Security Agency), they would have never
been able to publish their memoirs. I know of nobody who worked for the NSA and
published memoirs that were critical of the NSA, as McGehee, Phil Agee, Victor
Marchetti and John Stockwell have regarding the CIA.

Bill
Donovan (known as "Wild Bill") and Allen Dulles ran the OSS, and both
would later run the CIA, Donovan being its first director. Dulles ran the Secret
Intelligence Branch (SIB) of the OSS. Members of Dulles' SIB that became CIA
directors included Richard Helms and William Casey. Donovan was a Wall Street
lawyer, and his recruits were from Wall Street, Ivy League schools and large corporations.
Fittingly, the CIA was a capitalistic organization, suited to wage war against
communism. It was an Eastern Establishment organization from the outset, and
the half-joke of calling the CIA the "standing Army of the Fortune
500" can be traced to those men who founded and ran the OSS and subsequently
the CIA. Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell,
the man who largely manipulated Panama into being,
making big money for himself and his robber baron pals, chose Allen Dulles’ brother
John Foster to run his empire, and John Foster became Eisenhower’s Secretary of
State, when Allen also ran the CIA, during the McCarthy witch hunt days. During
their tenure, the Dulles brothers directed the overthrow of the Guatemalan
government on behalf of the corporation that brings Americans Chiquita bananas
(the Dulles brothers had a financial stake in
the affair), and they helped overthrow the Iranian
government on behalf of the oil interests.

With
the strong capitalist bent of the OSS hierarchy and American government, the communist
Soviet Union was seen as the true threat to American hegemony, something evident
in the comments of Leslie Groves and James Byrnes.
The OSS was ripe for what Gehlen had to offer: Nazi intelligence files on the
Soviet Union. The Nazi intelligence-gathering program on the Soviet Union was
one of history’s most evil undertakings. The bulk of the intelligence was received
from Soviet POWs. The Nazis intentionally murdered somewhere between three and
four million Soviet POWs.[271] They offered
the Soviet prisoners the chance to betray their people and collaborate with the
Nazis. The choice was collaborate or die. The majority of Soviet prisoners chose
death rather than betray their people, and they were summarily executed, starved
to death, etc. They were even shipped to the death camps to go straight into
the gas chambers and ovens. Those who cooperated provided the bulk of Nazi intelligence
on the Soviet Union. Gehlen's greatest accomplishment during the war was designing
the strategy of interrogating those POWs. After a POW told what he knew, he was
often shot immediately afterward or suffered the same fate of the uncooperative
prisoners. POWs that were more useful became cooks, chauffeurs and even troops
that fought for the Nazis. They also, as with others in Eastern Europe, became
the muscle in the extermination squads that roamed Eastern Europe, taking their
part in murdering more than twenty-five million people.[272] The carnage
of Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation has no comparable event. For sheer single-mindedness,
scale and intensity, it was a slaughter unmatched in history, with the death camps
only part of the scenery.

From that
charnel house came Gehlen's coveted intelligence files. The OSS was soon vying
with military intelligence over control of Gehlen's records. A power struggle
ensued that the OSS eventually won, culminating with the CIA’s formation. Gehlen
and his men were hired into the American intelligence network. There were cases
of Nazis working in the death camps on human experiments and going on the American
payroll weeks later. When the Klaus Barbie Affair became big news in 1983, with
the revelation that the United States actively protected the "Butcher of
Lyons" from war crimes prosecution, it was only the tip of the iceberg.
Operation Paperclip specialized in bringing Nazis secretly to America.

The space programs of the United States and
the Soviet Union were largely built from the German scientists who were spirited
out of Western Europe at the end of World War II. There was a fierce competition
between the U.S. and the Soviets to get the best German scientists from the spoils
of Germany, as they converged on the V-2 rocket works at Nordhausen. America
got Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and Walter Dornberger from the German V-2 program, men who worked with concentration
camp labor, working them to death.

The
dapper and aristocratic Von Braun was an SS man, hobnobbing with Heinrich Himmler,
educating him about rocketry as Himmler promoted him to a major in the SS, with
von Braun wearing his slick SS uniform.[273] Von Braun was an accomplished
liar long before he became famous, and was an accomplished showman.[274]
More than 20,000 concentration camp inmates died at the V-2 rocket works, being
worked to death. They were not just Jews dying at the Dora and Nordhausen concentration
camps, but expendable technically-oriented people, and a substantial number of
them were Allied prisoners of war. More than 700 French political prisoners died
there. Sadistic SS personnel ran the Dora camp, and even by concentration camp
standards Dora was exceedingly bloodthirsty, with daily executions by hanging,
machine gunning and torture. There were even turf wars over who could beat the
inmates. The civilians who worked at the rocket works would beat the prisoners
for fun, and after the doctor at Dora complained about it, the SS formally notified
Arthur Rudolf that his people were not to beat the prisoners; only SS personnel
could.[275]

Count Von Braun regularly visited the subterranean
facility at Dora. According to one of the surviving inmates, there was an ever-growing
pile of bodies that lay next to the infirmary, where the executed and tortured
were thrown. Von Braun walked so close to the pile of bodies as he performed
his duties that he could have practically reached out and touched it.[276] Even the inmates would stare
at the pile in horror. Von Braun would stroll past it, seemingly unaffected.
Desperately in need of prisoners with technical skills, von Braun personally handpicked
inmates from the nearby Buchenwald camp to become slaves at the rocket works.[277]

Hitler
was skeptical for years about the military potential of rockets, especially when
most tests ended in failure, and spectacularly so. When they finally got a rocket
to fly as it should, von Braun took that footage, combined cartoon footage with
it, and produced a movie extravaganza that bowled Hitler over in 1943. According
to the author of The Nazi Rocketeers, “Fritz Lang could not have done it
better.”[278] Hitler then gave massive support for the rocket
program, to develop a weapon of “annihilation.” At Dornberger’s request, Hitler
then bestowed a professorship on von Braun, and Hitler compared him to Alexander
the Great and Napoleon.

Werner von Braun
and friends were no different than all the other Nazis who tried escaping post-war
retribution. For von Braun, Gehlen and gang, they sold themselves to the Americans
as being useful, and instead of swinging from a noose at Nuremberg, they became
American heroes, living very comfortably in the United States. Those rocket
scientists became key figures in the U.S. space program, as did the German scientists
who came under Soviet control.

The
space program was the least of it. The Gehlen organization was hired nearly wholesale
by America, and the Gehlen group became almost the sole source of American information
about the Soviet Union for years, and that situation nearly led to World War III,
as the Nazis continually lied about Soviet military capacity and intentions, and
our government eagerly believed what it was told, because it wanted to believe
it. It is one of the darkest chapters in American foreign policy: hiring Nazis
to tell us what Soviet intentions were. The Gehlen organization greatly contributed
to the arms race and Cold War, exaggerating Soviet capability and intent. The
Soviet Union was not planning on invading Western Europe. They were trying to
recover from a generation of bloodshed that cost forty million lives or so.[279]
Hiring the Nazis undoubtedly helped lead to the CIA’s evil policies and other
U.S. security organizations, with Nazi-inspired programs
such as M-K-Ultra. Also, the Allies (America particularly) quickly re-armed
Japanese soldiers captured in Asia, and set them to work as colonial thugs to
try bringing Vietnam and China back into European/American control.[280]

The Aftermath in Europe

As
the dust was clearing in Europe, millions of German soldiers came under Allied
control. Germany had been on the losing end of two World Wars in less than a
thirty-year span, and the Allies were going to make sure that they could not wage
war again. France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States carved Germany
up into spheres of influence, including the capital city of Berlin. Henry
Morgenthau, a Jew who ran the U.S. Treasury, developed what became known as
the Morgenthau Plan, which was plainly stated in his 1945 book Germany is our
Problem. Morgenthau proposed to de-industrialize Germany and turn it into
a land of pastoral farmers. Morgenthau's plan was made a public issue in October
of 1944, and the Republicans publicized Morgenthau's plan to try gaining political
points on the eve of the presidential election. The Nazis used the disclosure
for propaganda to its people, which probably contributed to them fighting to the
bitter end in Berlin. In November of 1944, Bill Donovan
wrote,

"The horrible prospects
of exile to Siberia, eternal slavery, de-industrialization, breakup of Germany
and even sterilization, have been carefully portrayed to the Germans by their
Nazi leaders. It is considered that the German spirit of resistance has been
bolstered greatly by fear of the consequence of unconditional surrender."[281]

Their fears were not so farfetched. All Allies
extracted a measure of vengeance on the Germans, similar to the aftermath of World
War I, except far more extreme. The Soviet Union nearly eliminated Germany's
industrial capacity in its sphere of influence, dismantling Germany's factories
and shipping them to Russia to be rebuilt. France performed similarly. France
and Britain turned their German POWs into slave laborers, Britain keeping theirs
until 1948. The Soviet Union brutally expelled several million Germans who lived
in Eastern Europe. German POWs in Soviet hands died in vast numbers. As the
Soviet Army fought its way to Berlin, the Soviet soldiers raped every German woman
they could get their hands on, while often forcing their husbands to watch, and
other delights.[282]

Roosevelt held an opinion
wholly at variance with the scholarship of William Rubinstein
and others. In the summer of 1944, Roosevelt wrote,

"Too
many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole
are not responsible for what has taken place - that only a few Nazi leaders are
responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a
whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged
in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization."[283]

Roosevelt died before the
war's end, Morgenthau's influence waned under Truman, and in April 1945, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff issued JCS 1067, which was supposed to guide the denazification
of Germany after the war ended. It attempted to lay an American capitalistic
framework on the post-war German economy, but one that was demilitarized. How
JCS 1067 was implemented, however, demonstrated how similar Nazis and Americans
were. The denazification of German industry was well underway before the Americans
began imposing their rule on Germany. Unfortunately for American plans, those
denazifying Germany were anti-fascists. The anti-Nazis were generally left wing,
labor-based groups, the same kind that formed labor unions in America and were
derisively labeled "communist." In the end, United States rule suppressed
that democratic movement and installed in prominent positions many of the same
people who abetted Hitler's rise to power. Allen Dulles was buddies with many
of the pro-Nazi industrialists, and whitewashed their bloodstained records and
helped reinstall them high in German industry and banking, such as Karl Blessing.[284] Dulles also hired the Nazis to staff the CIA's intelligence network in Eastern Europe, while
protecting people such as Karl Wolff, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive
the war, and who was a principal sponsor of the Treblinka extermination camp.
Dulles had no problem with Nazis, as long as they were "his" Nazis.

James Bacque, a Canadian, published Other Losses in 1989.
Bacque made the case that after the European war ended, about one million German
soldiers died in the Allied prison camps. Bacque claimed that Allied leaders
largely induced the deaths of those German soldiers, intentionally. Bacque took
particular aim at Dwight Eisenhower, who came to hate the Germans as he witnessed
the destruction of Europe and the opening of the death camps. Bacque's most ardent
critic has been Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower's biographer and the director of the
Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. Ambrose, although he initially
hailed Bacque's work, later denounced it and edited a book to rebut Bacque's thesis
in Eisenhower and theGerman POWs, Facts against Falsehood in 1992.
Bacque's research and arithmetic is questionable, although Ambrose is the epitome
of an establishment historian. Bacque responded with Crimes and Mercies in
1997, digging into the newly available Soviet archives to further bolster his
case. Bacque also made the case that up to ten million Germans died under Allied
occupation between 1945 and 1950, largely from starvation.

Regarding
the Bacque and Ambrose imbroglio, Michael Adams wrote,

"The
truth is probably somewhere in the middle…One wrote, 'I witnessed the atrocities
that Stephen E. Ambrose tried to deny or gloss over'…As another American guard
admitted, 'we sometimes slipped over the boundary of civilized behavior and resembled
what we were fighting against.'"[285]

Zora
Neale Hurston wrote after World War II,

"I
am amazed at the complacency of the Negro press and public. Truman is a monster.
I can think of him as nothing else but the Butcher of Asia. Of his grin of triumph
on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of maintaining troops in
China who are shooting the starving Chinese for stealing a handful of food."[286]

When
establishment historians defend American soldiers and others, as if we are saints
in our foreign policy, our noble boys going abroad to "defend freedom"
and "fight for our country," I am reminded
of the experiences told me by Vietnam veterans, both first hand and second hand. The viciousness that Eugene
Sledge recounted in his memoirs is typical in World War II accounts. Paul
Fussell wrote how his men shot a group of twenty German soldiers, huddling in
a crater, "most in tears of terror or despair" as the Americans came
upon them. For no reason at all, the Americans opened fire on the surrendering
and quite helpless Germans. Fussell called it the Great Turkey Shoot, writing,

"Laughing
and howling, hoo-ha-ing and cowboy and good-old-boy yelling, our men exultantly
shot into the crater until every single man down there was dead. A few tried
to scale the sides, but there was no escape. If a body twitched or moved at all,
it was shot again. The result was deep satisfaction, and the event was transformed
into amusing narrative, told and retold over campfires all that winter. If it
made you sick, you were not supposed to indicate. I was beginning to understand
what a marine sergeant told Philip Caputo during the Vietnam War: 'Before you
leave here, Sir, you're going to find out that one of the most brutal things in
the world is your average nineteen-year-old
American boy.'"[287]

"On
the other hand, there are things about which there's no controversy. Ed Herman
and I wrote about them back in the late 1970s. Basically, the Americans ran what
were called "re-education camps" for German POWs (the name was ultimately
changed to something equally Orwellian). These camps were hailed as a tremendous
example of our humanitarianism, because we were teaching the prisoners democratic
ways (in other words, we were indoctrinating them into accepting our beliefs).

"The prisoners were treated very brutally,
starved, etc. Since these camps were in gross violation of international conventions,
they were kept secret. We were afraid that the Germans might retaliate and treat
American prisoners the same way.

"Furthermore,
the camps continued after the war; I forget for how long, but I think the US kept
German POWs until mid-1946. They were used for forced labor, beaten and killed.
It was even worse in England. They kept their German POWs until mid-1948. It
was all totally illegal.

"Finally,
there was public reaction in Britain. The person who started it off was Peggy
Duff, a marvelous woman who died a couple of years ago. She was later one of
the leading figures in the CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and the
international peace movement during the 1960s and 1970s, but she started off her
career with a protest against the treatment of German POWs.

"Incidentally,
why only German POWs? What about the Italians? Germany's a very efficient country,
so they've published volumes of documents on what happened to their POWs. But
Italy's sort of laid back, so there was no research on their POWs. We don't know
anything about them, although they were surely treated much worse.

"When
I was a kid, there was a POW camp right next to my high school. There were conflicts
among the students over the issue of taunting the prisoners. The students couldn't
physically attack the prisoners, because they were behind a barrier, but they
threw things at them and taunted them. There were a group of us who thought this
was horrifying and objected to it, but there weren't many."[288]

Chomsky
has stated that the first chapter in an honest history of the aftermath of World
War II would be about how food was used as a political weapon. It is true that
many Americans were in favor of feeding and helping out the people of Europe (much
less so for those hated, non-white Japs), and the generous spirit of the average
American is to be commended in that instance, yet their politicians all-too-often
used the Marshall Plan and other help for political leverage.

The
aftermath of World War II was in some ways a turning point for humanity: the next
World War would extinguish humanity. Another total war would mean the total extermination
of the human race. The United States had the early lead in atomic weapon development,
but the Soviet Union, Britain, Canada and France were not far behind. The next
war would annihilate the species, taking the planet with it. That sobering realization
hit all parties. Probably the only thing that kept another World War from happening
was that the concept of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, was understood.

Nevertheless, the
people who run America's military establishment had the idea they could win a
nuclear war. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, had a concept
of diplomacy that gave rise to Dr. Strangelove and other works of art.
Dulles threatened the Soviet Union with nuclear attack as his style of diplomacy.
Dulles' style became known as "brinksmanship."

In
1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon, and the two powers began
an arms race that saw them build enough nuclear weapons to incinerate earth’s
entire surface many times over. Also in 1949, the United States had a plan to
attack the Soviet Union with atomic weapons. The plan was to deliver about seventy
nuclear weapons onto the Soviet Union over a thirty-day period, which would destroy
about 40% of the Soviet Union's industrial capacity. The Joint Chiefs of Staff
realized, however, that dropping seventy nuclear bombs onto the Soviet Union would
not be enough to assure victory. They realized that they would also need ground
troops, and the members of the infamous Bloodstone program (staffed with Nazis
and Nazi-collaborators that the United States hired after World War II was over)
would engage in completing the American victory over the Soviet Union. The Bloodstone
mercenaries were to be flown to the glowing ruins of the Soviet Union to complete
the job. A major aspect of the plan was to foment an uprising of the Soviet people
against the Stalin regime. Christopher Simpson wrote,

"The
thirty day atomic assault, the Pentagon concluded with considerable understatement,
'might stimulate resentment against the United States' among the people of the
USSR, thus increasing their will to fight."[289]

In November of 1997, Bill Clinton issued a
Presidential Decision Directive that authorized the U.S. military's use of nuclear
weapons on nations that may have weapons of "mass destruction."[290]

The
Third World War and the Modern War Racket

Cooler heads prevailed regarding those Stangelovian plans of 1949.
It soon became evident that such events would bring the annihilation of the human
species, and the few survivors might wish they were dead. It became evident that
the imperial nations could no longer wage open war against each other. So, logically,
America reverted to neocolonial warfare against the world’s colored people, hence
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
Panama, etc. Since
World War II, American has always picked on nations that could not fight back,
and no atomic weapons they could retaliate with. American war planners considered
dropping atomic bombs on Vietnam, and Cal Thomas and friends openly argued for dropping
atomic bombs on Iraq during the Gulf War Turkey Shoot. In the name of making
sure that Iraq never acquires the kinds of weapons that we have, America has killed
more than one million Iraqi citizens since 1991,
about half of them children.

Astute
commentators from across America’s political spectrum call the U.S. war against
the world’s poor the Third World War. When the
lies and rhetoric are stripped away, it is obviously a continuation, with slight
variation, of the age-old imperial game, with the U.S. elbowing the other imperial
players out of the way. With the collapse of its empire after World War II, Great
Britain has been a relatively impoverished nation, and has been trying to ride
the U.S.’ coattails since the Cold War ended, helping out with bludgeoning
Iraq and carrying the U.S.’ bags during its “war
on terror.”

Cold War rhetoric and
disinformation largely obscured the colonial aspect of the postwar years, at least
from the American people. During the Cold War, the more fortunate Third World
nations, generally those who had something the West coveted and had relative cultural
sophistication, were able to play the capitalist and communist powers off against
each other, to a degree. However, when the Berlin Wall fell, marking the end
of the Soviet Empire, America quickly showed the world what the global dynamics
really were; America invaded Panama a couple of weeks after
the Berlin Wall fell, concocting rationales so transparently ridiculous they should
have been considered jokes, except that the American invasion killed thousands
of Panamanian civilians. With the Soviet Union out of the picture, the U.S. quickly
found an excuse to establish a military presence in the oil-rich Middle East,
something it largely could not do before. The United States may well have baited
Iraq into invading Kuwait. If not, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a convenient
excuse for America to flex its muscles in the Middle East, and its ongoing genocide
in Iraq and military presence in Saudi Arabia were possibly the two
largest factors behind the World Trade Center attacks of 2001. Saudi Arabia contains
the holiest sites of Islam, and Osama bin Laden was particularly dismayed when
Arabia’s rulers allowed a U.S. military presence there. As I am writing this,
the United States is once again preparing to invade the Middle East, allegedly to remove Saddam
Hussein from power, and Saudi Arabia has made it clear that it will not allow
the United States to use its nation as a staging ground, as it did in 1990-1991.[291]

The United States has been throwing around its weight since the
Cold War ended with predictable impunity (the U.S. is called a “hyper-power” in
France), and just as predictable were the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks of 2001: the global Godzilla finally got punched
in the nose. Just as the “war on drugs,” “war on cancer,”
“war on communism” and other phony wars, the “War on Terror” is the new rubric
under which the world’s people have been subjected. In Colombia,
many thousands of peasants were slaughtered as part of the war on communism, those
peasants being called Soviet pawns. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the same
groups of people (Colombian government military and paramilitary) killed the same
peasants, but then the killings were part of the “war on drugs.” During the summer
of 2002, Bill Clinton called the government military effort in Colombia part of
the war on terror. How can anybody take the rhetoric seriously, with the same
peasants being communists one day, drug growers and dealers the next, and now
terrorists? When one phony term wears out, our “leaders” just make up another.

Numerous foreign relations scandals hatched
during the past generation, the most notorious being the Iran-Contra Scandal.
Although the U.S. government did its best to cover-up what happened, enough came
into the open to see how the game was played. The U.S. was selling arms to Iran
and the Contras, and airplanes were flying to the Nicaraguan Contras with arms,
and flying back with drugs, drug sales being a longtime
favorite method to finance covert action.[292] The Iran-Contra
Scandal was directly related to the Savings and
Loan Scandal, as the CIA used savings and loan institutions to launder drug
money. The Iran-Contra Scandal was an embarrassment, with government officials
dragged onto the witness stand, with document-shredding parties coming into the
open and other activities. Accordingly, U.S. covert action has been getting more
privatized ever since, especially since the Cold War ended.[293]
The U.S. began privatizing covert action after the
1953 overthrow of the Iranian government. If private individuals and organizations
do the dirty work, instead of operating out of the White House as Oliver North
did, the likelihood of government officials being subpoenaed and airing out the
government’s dirty laundry is minimized. The privatization effort is a new tactic
to avoid public accountability and create more plausible denial, which naturally
further shreds the U.S. Constitution, with U.S. wars being planned and carried
out by mercenaries and those who employ them.

The racketeering aspect of warfare has been long with us. Smedley
Butler wrote War is a Racket before
World War II and the rise of today’s military-industrial complex. Dwight Eisenhower
stated,

"People in the long
run are going to do more to promote peace than our government...One of these days
government had better get out of their way and let them have it."

and

"…Every
gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the
final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed."

Being
a U.S. arms manufacturer is one of the world’s most lucrative deals, and they can be quite ruthless. After World
War II, the lucrative aspect of the military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower
warned against when he left office as president, became big business.

America’s national debt is
mainly due to the war industry, a national debt that is measured in trillions
of dollars. It is well known that trying to keep up with America in the arms
race, a race that the U.S. always instigated, not the Soviets, largely bankrupted
the Soviet Empire. It was even admitted by Reagan and his policy-makers. Trillions of dollars went into arming
both sides to the teeth, and the only winners were the arms manufacturers and
the imperial exploiters. Today, the United States is the leading international
arms dealer, and has been so for many years. America’s "foreign aid"
is generally in arms sales. Far more money is spent on arms internationally (about
twenty times as much.) than is spent on helping the poor and hungry. Other side effects are
the widespread environmental devastation that the war industry inflicts on the
world, even when they are not fighting wars.[294]
The war industry is probably the most costly and unnecessary undertaking on earth
today, especially if World War III exterminates the human species.

The
"defense" industry in the United States has raked in trillions of dollars
during the past fifty years (one authoritative estimate puts it at nearly twenty
trillion dollars[295]).
When the Cold War ended, there literally were no more enemies worth worrying about.
Once the "Soviet Menace" evaporated, the defense establishment searched
high and low to find enemies to keep justifying the pork barrel. Muammar Qaddafi,
Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, drug dealers, Castro, etc., had to be magically
transformed into malevolent demons that threatened America’s very existence.
America has the biggest killing machine the world has ever seen, and no military
rivals. The Gulf War and pounding Yugoslavia were excuses to test weapons and
increase America’s hegemony. The war racket is related to the government racket.
Ronald Reagan told tall tales about welfare mothers driving
Cadillacs, while he threw mentally ill people onto the streets. There is a small
book that summarizes all the ways that the American public is bilked to buy Cadillacs
for the rich, not the welfare mothers.[296]

The
Savings and Loan Scandal lined the pockets of the
rich to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars at the taxpayer's expense.
It was a scandal that my CPA profession actively abetted, taking in its huge audit
fees for signing off on fictitious financial statements. The authors of Take
the Rich off Welfare summarize the many ways that the rich get handouts from
the American government, such as: social security tax inequities, accelerated
depreciation, capital gains deductions, homeowner's tax breaks, agribusiness subsidies,
aviation subsidies, insurance loopholes, tax free bonds, timber subsidies, oil
and gas tax breaks, nuclear subsidies, etc. They are laws that primarily benefit
the wealthy. The rationale is that they are subsidies that benefit the economic
producers, giving them incentives or help to make the economy more productive.
The media, being owned by those corporate welfare recipients,
rarely highlights the real welfare. When I was a tax
accountant, I saw the scam in action. Politicians write laws that benefit
their constituencies, which are the rich people who bankroll their campaigns and
basically own them. The accounting in Take the Rich off Welfare is conservative,
as the authors add up all the boondoggles that rip off the American taxpayer to
benefit the rich. The biggest single category of rip off is what the authors
call "military waste and fraud." The waste and fraud are for weapons
systems that nobody in the military wants, but billions are still spent for them,
and other outrages. The authors summarized some of the defense contractors’ pricing
schemes:

A nut that can
be bought at a hardware store for a few cents that McDonnell Douglas charged $2,043
for;

A pair of pliers that Boeing tried
charging $2,548 for, but the Air Force slashed the price to $748;

The
famous toilet seat that Lockheed charged "only" $640 for;

A
$240 flashlight from Grimes Manufacturing;

The
authors' favorite was a plastic cap that goes over the end of a stool leg, that
Boeing charged $1,118 each for.[297]

That barely scratches the surface of the waste
and fraud that is a daily part of America’s military-industrial establishment.
Billions of dollars in military equipment simply "disappears" every
year. There are many weapons systems that cannot be justified by the most fervent
imagination, especially with the Soviet Empire gone, but America keeps upgrading
nuclear missiles, transport planes, jet fighters, submarines and the like to the
tune of tens of billions of dollars. Some items, such as the Seawolf submarine,
the Navy itself says that it does not need or want it, but they are getting one
for a few billion dollars. There is the Black Budget, the totally unaccountable
budget of about $30 billion a year to fund the NSA and other spook agencies.
If Americans found out what really happened in the spook world, it would
curl their hair. I have had friends who worked in that world, and it can be sickening
and nearly beyond belief at times.

The
authors of Take the Rich off Welfare conservatively calculate how much
of the military expenditures are a complete waste of money, and arrive at $172
billion a year. When they add up merely the major categories of welfare for the
rich, their conservative calculation is that it costs America at least
$448 billion a year, money that lines the pockets of the rich for no perceived
public benefit. That is partly how the rich get richer. The authors then calculate
how much public money goes to serving the needs of the poor in America. The number
is about $130 billion.[298] In the end, the American government
is a mechanism that makes the rich richer, taxes the middle class, and throws
some crumbs to the poor who do the work.

I
have professional friends who have tried justifying
why poor Mexicans pick America’s food and make its clothes, why poor Indonesians
and Filipinos staff luxury cruise ships and make America’s tennis shoes, why black Americans work
in the most wretched factories in the worst jobs, and the like, as if it was the
natural order of things, with them at the top of the heap due to their unique
virtue. Then they say that we are trying to help Indonesia by putting our shoe
factories there, to get them "capital." They read the Wall Street
Journal too much.

The war racket
makes huge sums of money for certain people, while others die horrible deaths
or live in unspeakable misery. There are persuasive arguments that the same interests
arm both sides in the wars, not really caring much who wins, just as long as everybody
"plays."[299] The Soviet and German
war machines in World War II were partly built, some say largely built, by
American industrialists. Chomsky's Year 501, the Conquest Continues, looks
at this 500-year period of European dominance of the world from another, non-conspiratorial,
perspective. C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite looked at the post-war
evolution of the power structure that runs America today, and Mills endured great
grief for daring to publish his book.

There
is another facet of the war racket, and perhaps the most important of all. Those
behind the scenes, pulling the strings, truly enjoy
all the death and suffering that war creates. That may be their biggest payoff,
watching all the death and suffering they manipulate into being, and it nourishes
them, literally. Healing our hearts is the great task before us, and time is
short.

[2] I trained for the testing. My weak point in the
testing regimen was pull-ups, so I did them daily and got up to twelve at a time,
which would have been plenty to pass their standard. One test was throwing and
another was jumping. I was a high jumper and long jumper in high school, and
a javelin thrower and high jumper in college. The athletics testing would have
been no barrier.

[9] See Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, pp.
484-489, for his initial estimate of twenty million dead. This issue has been
highly controversial. In 2007, Conquest revised his estimate to thirteen to fifteen
million, the preface of the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror.

[14] These are not controversial facts, being part of
the U.S. government record. For some narratives regarding those early Bush days,
see Russell Bowen’s Immaculate Deception, pp. 1-12. See also Val Valerian’s
Matrix III, which contains The Secret History of George Bush, beginning
on p. 563.

[20] See Schmidt, Maverick Marine, pp. 38-57.
For more excerpts from Butler's correspondence in those days, see General Smedley
Darlington Butler, The Letters of a Leatherneck, 1989-1931, edited by Anne
Cipriano Venzon.

[26] See Jules Archer's The Plot to Seize the White
House. See The National Insecurity Council, It's a Conspiracy!, pp.
179-184. See Vankin and Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time,
pp. 233-238.

[29] See Loewen, Lies my Teacher Told Me, p. 167
for a picture of a lynch mob proudly posing next to a burning black man. In the
foreground of the crowd is a woman who appeared dressed for a night on the town.
The reason for such bold and murderous lawlessness was that the killers knew that
no white jury would ever convict them of murder, even with a picture of them proudly
posing beside their prey. The recent book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,
shows how common, even festive, American lynchings were, not so long ago. Loewen
had a history book of his rejected partly because of that photo by the Mississippi
State Textbook Board. During the 1864 Democratic campaign, in their songbook
was a song sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. The song was one of the favorites
of that campaign year, a year when a war was going on to supposedly free the slaves.
The song was titled "Nigger Doodle Dandy." Here is one verse: "Blubber
lips are killing sweet, and kinky heads are splendid; and oh, it makes such bully
feet to have the heels extended." Then the Chorus: "Nigger Doodle's
all the go, Ebony shins and bandy, "loyal" people must all bow to Nigger
Doodle Dandy." See Loewen, Lies my Teacher Told Me, p. 155. Loewen
would ask his history classes to sing along with him, singing the words of those
noble democrats. The people would be so shocked by the words that they sat in
stupefied silence.

[30] See Simon, The State of Humanity, p. 183.
See The American Almanac, 1996-1997, table 710.

[31] There is an excellent documentary about America and
the Holocaust titled America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference,
which is part of the American Experience series. That woman's reminiscence
and other facts I recite in this section come from that documentary. I also have
used Leonard Dinnerstein's Anti-Semitism in America, Leni Yahil's The
Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, Johnson's A History of the Jews,
Chaliand and Rageau's The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, Raul Hilberg's Perpetrators,
Victims, Bystanders, David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews, Dawidowicz
and Altshuler's Hitler's War Against the Jews, and other sources I will
cite as I use them.

[33] See Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, vol. 1, pp. 347-453. See Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire,
pp. 155-171 and 185-202. See Fogel, Junípero Serra, the Vatican and Enslavement
Theology, pp. 4-9.

[34] See an iconoclastic survey of those early Christian
days in Michael Parenti's History as Mystery, pp. 35-127.

[36] See, for instance, Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption
of Scripture. See Moore, The Christian Conspiracy. See Fox, The
Unauthorized Version. See Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ.
See Kersten, Jesus Lived in India. See Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels.

[46] See Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 175-176.
See Riley-Smith, The Crusades, A Short History, pp. 16-20. See Armstrong,
Holy War, The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, pp. 71-75. See
Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 217.

[47] See Chomsky’s discussion of the “Sacralization of
War” in his Rogue States, pp. 156-159.

[52]
Some of my sources for the Cathars and the Crusade that Pope Innocent III directed
against them are Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montsegur: A History of the Albigensian
Crusade; Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol.
1; Burman, The Inquisition,The Hammer of Heresy; Armstrong, Holy
War, The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World; Riley-Smith, The Crusades,
A Short History.

[60] See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide,
p. 107, footnote. The studies Churchill refers are the most respected estimates
in today’s scholarship.

[61] For a brief summary of the disaster of the sugar
economy on the native lands and populations (and the imported slaves), see Eduardo
Galeano's "King Sugar," in Confronting Columbus, pp. 76-82.

[62] See a rather informal but accurate discussion of
those fur trade types in Terrell's Land Grab, pp. 117-178. For a broader
summary of the fur trade's progress across North America, in its English, French,
Russian and American aspects, see Wolf, Europe and the People Without History,
chapter six, pp. 158-194.

[63] For a brief summary of what the white man's ways
have done to the economy of South America, see Luis Guillermo Lumbreras' "Misguided
Development" in Confronting Columbus, pp. 76-82.

[64] See Renner, Michael. "Ending Violent Conflict",
The State of the World, 1999, p. 154.

[65] See Renner, Michael. "Ending Violent Conflict",
The State of the World, 1999, p. 153.

[66] Chomsky can be seen talking to William F. Buckley
on TV about that issue in the documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky
and the Media. Chomsky was talking about the Vietnam War and the complicity
of Americans who watch the tube, nod, and grab another beer, as contributing to
such activity continuing.

[67] See Armitage, Copernicus,The Founder of
Modern Astronomy, pp. 56-67.

[89] My source for this account is an article by Monica
Moorehead, posted at the International Action Center's webs site, and her information
was taken largely from "Death in a Promised Land - The Tulsa Race Riot of
1921" by Scott Ellsworth. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1982)

[90] See Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, Blum's
Killing Hope and Churchill and Vander Wall's The COINTELPRO Papers,
for a good start.

[97] See Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast, pp.
146-147. See historian David Wyman, who wrote The Abandonment of the Jews,
which was the source for Simpson's work on that issue, talk about that incident
and others in the documentary America and the Holocaust. See Wyman's The
Abandonment of the Jews, pp. 79-103. See also Yahil, The Holocaust,
pp. 608-609. See also Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, pp. 143-146.

[98] That photograph can be seen in the documentary America
and the Holocaust.

[99] See Weinberg, A World at Arms, p. 894. See
Michael Renner, "Ending Violent Conflict," State of the World, 1999,
pp. 151-168.

[100] Werner Weinberg, "The Shame of Bergen-Belsen,"
first published in the Journal of Reform Journalism and later in Self-Portrait
of a Holocaust Survivor. The version I read is in the Connecting Link,
issue 26, 1994, pp. 105-106, by Weinberg's daughter, Susanne Konicov, the Connecting
Link's editor and publisher.

[101] See Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America,
p. 132. It is generally considered that anti-Semitism peaked in America in 1944.

[109] For discussions of those and other practices, with
a number of them surviving to the present day, read Ward Churchill's Since
Predator Came, Struggle for the Land, and A Little Matter of Genocide.
If you want to read about such current American practices from a white man, read
Rex Weyler's Blood of the Land.

[112] See Simon, The State of Humanity, p. 183.
See also the American Almanac's various tables. For a dramatic and unanswerable
depiction of that income stagnation among blacks, see table 717. In 1970, black
family income was 61% of white income. In 1994, it had declined to 60%.
Not only that, 1994 was a "good year" for blacks as it reversed the
trend that saw 1993 family income actually lower than 1970 family income,
in constant dollars.

[113] In 1989, in constant dollars, native, black and Hispanic
family incomes were all comparable, at about 60% of the white income, with the
Hispanic population having a slight edge. A problem with "Hispanic"
however, is that it is not a racial distinction as black and native are, and many
in the Hispanic category are white people, such as the ruling classes of Latin
America. If the "Hispanic" population was broken down into categories
such as "primarily European descent" and "primarily native descent,"
there would be two very distinct populations. Members of the white ruling class
of Latin America are not to be found in the "Hispanics" who pick America's
produce. I do not know if such data has even been collected, but it would evidence
two distinct strata, with the "native Hispanics" having a lower income
level than the "average" Hispanic. My wife is Hispanic, but is about
the furthest thing that one can imagine from a bean picker. Her family hails
from Spain, and has lived in New Mexico for centuries with land "granted"
to them from the Spanish Crown. They are ruling class Hispanics who own vast
ranches, not those who pick our beans. The native tribes show great variation
in income levels. The "civilized" Cherokee and Iroquois tribes do very
"well," at around 60% of white income. Other tribes that have resisted
assimilation and are more confined to their reservations, such as the Sioux and
Navajo, have income levels as low as 30% of white income. They are also the natives
with such low life expectancies. See The American Almanac, 1996-1997,
table 52.

[114] Still, America's literati were not always happy with
Costner's far more honest depiction of native life before the white man, and they
engaged in attacks on the movie. See Churchill's Indians are Us?, pp.
115-137.

[116] As Chomsky, Herman
and others make quite plain, "national interest" is a code word for
"corporate interest." America does not send troops to defend and promote
democracy, but to defend its grip on cheap labor and resources, to keep the chips
flowing the corporate way, and their customers'. Yet, the customer benefit is
in some ways an unintended byproduct. The Holy Grail of corporations is profits,
not a well-served public, which is the whole point of my racketeering
for fun and profit thrust.

[117]I have discovered a “myth-debunking” stance, which seems more like
establishment apologetics, in several areas during my research for this site,
including the Inquisition, the career of George Custer, health and medicine.

[118] See, for instance, Verne Newton's FDR and the
Holocaust. Just as all the responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust should
not be heaped on Hitler's shoulders, FDR should not be held mainly accountable
for the United States' reaction while the Jewish Holocaust was coming and being
carried out. In both instances, proponents of the “culpability” theory subscribe
to the "Great Man" view of history.

[146] James H. Kitchens III, “The Bombing of Auschwitz
Reexamined,” Originally in The Journal of Military History (April 1994),
pp. 233-66. Reproduced in Newton's FDR and the Holocaust, pp. 183-217.
Levy's argument is reproduced in FDR and the Holocaust, pp. 219-272.

[150] For instance, Howard Zinn makes a compelling case
for the head-on-a-platter aspect of the Watergate scandal, where Nixon and his
cronies were publicly crucified, while the system that created the Nixons were
left intact and not questioned. See Zinn, A People's History of the United
States, pp. 529-569.

[151] See Herzstein, "Is It Time to Stop Asking Why
the West Failed to Save More Jews?" Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
Fall 1998, pp. 326-338.

[154] For instance, see the map and numbers presented in
Altshuler and Dawidowicz's Hitler's War Against the Jews, immediately after
the book's introduction, for typical estimates of the fate of European Jews, which
are faithful to the historical evidence. See the table on p. 197 of Götz Aly's
Final Solution, for a detail of Jews that came under Nazi control leading
up to the Final Solution, which tabulated more than eleven million Jews subject
to the Final Solution, as compared to Harwood's three million.

[157]On
Holocaust Denial, among my sources are Andrew Carter's The Facts - and the
Myths - about the Holocaust, Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die?,
Kenneth Stern's Holocaust Denial, and Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the
Holocaust. Also, there is plenty of material on the Internet devoted to the
issues both pro and con, such as transcripts from the Canadian trials of Ernest
Zündel, a Holocaust denier.

[159] See Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry,
which Raul Hilberg says is “going in the right direction.”

[160] Gypsies prefer to call themselves the Romani and
Sinti people. I use "Gypsy" in this narrative for the sake of convention.
Like it or not, people have become known as "white, Indian, Gypsy, Jew"
and other names, names that they may not always like hearing. I have tried using
names for those groups that are not offensive but are also generally recognized.

[162] For instance, see Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre
Rageau's The Penguin Atlas of the Diasporas, p. 109, for a summary of the
world estimate of the Gypsy population, which ranges between eight and fifteen
million people.

[168] See Stern Holocaust Denial, pp. 53-54 and
notes 125 and 126, on pp. 172-172. What Chomsky has always done regarding
the Cambodian genocide is to demonstrate the hypocrisy
regarding how the American media handled it. Chomsky compared it to the mass
slaughters in Indonesia and East Timor, for instance. The Cambodian genocide
was partly an American media fabrication, and the first major killings in Cambodia
the United States performed (at least a half million killed), a fact unmentioned
in the drumbeat of "genocide" that dominated the American press. When
it later turned out that Pol Pot’s “nationalistic” project was indeed genocidal,
the U.S. press was accidentally correct. See Chomsky and Herman, The Washington
Connection and Third World Fascism, pp. 19-22. See Chomsky and Herman, After
the Cataclysm, pp. 135-294. See Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, pp. 289-297.
See Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 260-296. Regarding
the Faurisson affair, see the documentary Manufacturing Consent. See also
Rai, Chomsky's Politics, pp. 131-132, 201-202.

[206] Imperial rhetoric can always be counted on to frame
events such as the Boxer uprising as a “rebellion,” “mutiny,” and the like, as
with Pontiac’s ”Rebellion,” the Sepoy “Mutiny,”
etc., as if loyal subjects irrationally rebelled against their natural masters.

[225]
Posted to Internet on October 1, 1996. Kai Bird is the author of The Chairman:
John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment, co-edited by Lawrence
Lifschultz, the first comprehensive biography of McCloy. Bird is a contributing
editor to The Nation, one of the leading left wing periodicals. Also,
Bird is the co-author of Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History
and the Smithsonian Controversy, also co-edited by Lifschultz.

[236] See Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic
Bomb, pp. 458-471, especially p. 467.

[237] See Wyden, Day One. See the map on the book
cover, of the hardback version, and read the descriptions of what it was like
for the few survivors near ground zero. For Truman's many lies over the years
regarding the American lives that would have been saved, see Alperovitz, The
Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pp. 515-530.

[261] Reagan began his political career as a fervent supporter
of the McCarthy witch hunt trails, even “ratting” on people in Hollywood for McCarthy’s
tribunal. Reagan testified at it. Reagan met his wife Nancy when she discovered
that her name was in the Hollywood back list and she went to him for help, and
he got her off it. His activities also wrecked many Hollywood careers.

[269] See Chomsky, Class Warfare, pp. 59-61. See
Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, p. 419. See Zinn, Declarations
of Independence, pp. 95-96.

[270] See Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic
Bomb, pp. 337-338.

[271] See Weinberg, A World at Arms, pp. 300-301.
See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 48. See Simpson, Blowback,
p. 14, 18, 19, 44. The main source of my information about the early CIA days
is mainly Simpson's Blowback, but for my general knowledge of the CIA I
also used other sources of information such as Blum's Killing Hope, McGehee's
Deadly Deceits, Stich's Defrauding America, CIA operatives I have
known, the work of Noam Chomsky and other sources, some thoroughly establishment,
such as Loch Johnson's America's Secret Power.

[272] See the summary of that grisly toll in Churchill
A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 43-49.

[273] See Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams
of Space and Crimes of War, pp. 94-97.

[274] See Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams
of Space and Crimes of War, pp. 24-26.

[275] See Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams
of Space and Crimes of War, p. 159.

[282] The accounts of that Soviet behavior are many. For
one first-person account, see the account of Klaus Fuhrmann, a Berliner, who describes
the Soviet entrance to Berlin and how they raped his wife in their bedroom, while
the husband stood there with a pistol pushed against his chest, in John Carey's
Eyewitness to History, pp. 625-630.

[287] See Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 124. As
an anecdote regarding such brutality, one interrogation tactic of our boys in
Vietnam was taking a bunch of prisoners up in a helicopter, and when one would
not talk, they would throw him out of it, seeing if it might loosen the lips of
the prisoners who witnessed that act. That "helicopter therapy" was
the least of it. One close relative of mine knew a man who specialized in that
brand of interrogation. Throwing them out of the helicopter to their deaths was
easy and unimaginative. My relative's buddy specialized in the high art of interrogation.
He manned one of those machine guns that were mounted on those helicopters. They
would throw out a hapless prisoner, but he would not fall to his death. My relative's
buddy would shoot the prisoner with his machine-gun, while the prisoner was in
mid-air. It was macabre skeet shooting. He could keep the prisoner aloft with
the force of the bullets hitting his body. The bullets’ force overcame gravity,
keeping the body in the air. He could keep a body in the air for quite some time.
With each shot the body would move further away from the helicopter, and spin
with the force of the bullets hitting it. In a successful episode, the body would
stay in the air until the bullets began disintegrating the body.